Professional athletes have been putting the power of their blood platelets to work helping them recover after injury or surgery for years. What if you put the same platelets to work restoring thinning hair or rejuvenating dull, lifeless facial skin?

You can do that at Dr. Barrera’s with platelet-rich plasma.

What is platelet-rich plasma?

We all know our blood platelets are crucial for wound healing, enabling the blood to clot and stem the bleeding when we cut our skin. But what most of us don’t know is that platelets also contain seven growth factors that aid in the healing of the wound.

The idea behind platelet-rich plasma is to concentrate these qualities. Here’s how. We draw a sample of your blood, the same amount taken for routine blood work. We then place the blood in a centrifuge and remove all of the red blood cells. What you have left is concentrated blood platelets, white blood cells, and plasma — platelet-rich plasma. This is a serum with powerful healing abilities, fueled by the seven growth factors. Growth factors aren’t quite what their name sounds like. They are the messengers between the cells, signaling the cells to perform different functions. Yes, they may signal for new skin cells to be produced to heal a wound. But they have other roles, as well.

Using PRP on your scalp

When the value of athletes using PRP to speed injury recovery started to spread, it wasn’t long before it was tested for cases of men and women suffering from hair loss. When this happens, more and more of your hair follicles are entering and staying in the dormant phase of the hair growth cycle. That means fewer follicles are producing hair, so your hair begins to thin. When PRP is injected into these thinning areas on the scalp, the growth factors and other healing qualities can kick start dormant hair follicles back to the anagen/growth phase of the hair lifecycle. So, those areas that have been thinning can stop losing hair and then begin to regrow hair and fill back in.

Adding PRP to microneedling

Our SkinPen Microneedling is a popular stand-alone procedure for our patients from across the Houston area. Microneedling creates hundreds of microscopic punctures through the epidermis down into the dermis layer to trigger wound healing mechanisms in the skin. This includes new production of collagen and elastin to heal the perceived wounds, although they actually are fully healed just a couple hours after your microneedling session.

But Dr. Barrera wanted to make our microneedling even better by offering to add PRP application to the facial skin afterwards. This is the perfect time to apply PRP to your skin, as the hundreds of microscopic punctures created with microneedling offer a great way for the concentrated platelets and growth factors to penetrate the epidermis into the dermis where they can do the most good.

Want to put the power of platelets to work for your thinning hair or your facial skin? Call us at (713) 468-5200 to schedule an appointment.