2025 guide to PRP: cost and possible benefits

Platelet-rich plasma or PRP has become one of the most commonly used regenerative products at unproven clinics. The orthopedics departments at many universities are now offering PRP as well.

What is behind this trend? How much data are there to back up all this enthusiasm for platelet-rich plasma?

The goal of this post is to educate readers on key facts about PRP.

PRP use | Is it worth it? | What exactly is PRP? |  Lack of standardization | PRP injection cost | How long does PRP last | Objective views on PRP | Is PRP a valuable option?

Overall quick PRP review: PRP or platelet-rich-plasma is a growth factor-rich substance made from a patient’s own blood. PRP has promise mostly for temporary relief of some orthopedic conditions. Some institutions are offering PRP for hair loss too. However, highly variable trial outcomes make it difficult to pinpoint where it may be most promising, one reason why it is not the standard of care for any condition. Most trials have not conducted long-term follow up, but risks seem generally low compared to most cell therapies. Overall, it’s unclear whether PRP is worth the cost for largely temporary relief of some health issues. Patients considering PRP will want to discuss it with their physicians. 

Above you can see an image of a PRP injection. In this case a doctor injects a hand with PRP. It’s unclear that PRP consistently helps hand problems.

PRP is more widely used and studied

PRP is often also injected for other diverse orthopedic applications such as into joints.

Data for many applications like these are not clear as to benefit. You can find papers pointing to possible small benefits or no benefit. A recent study found no benefit of PRP For Achilles tendon issues (for which it is often sold). In fact, the patients who got the PRP actually fared worse initially.

You may also find my new infographic with the key facts about platelet rich plasma to be useful below.

Some university medical centers are getting in the act too of trying it, mainly for orthopedic conditions.

Sometimes PRP is offered as a stand-alone therapy. In other cases it is combined with various kinds of stem cells for injection.

While it is most often used within the orthopedics world, you can also find it marketed for almost any ailment. PRP for hair loss treatment is now widely available. See some of my past posts on regenerative therapies (mostly stem cells) for baldness here.

There are now more than 1,500 listings on Clinicaltrials.gov for a search for platelet-rich plasma as of 2025. This is up from around 1,200 just three years ago.

The listings are a mix of real clinical trial studies and also for-profit clinic listings. Some of the listings are much less rigorous studies. These studies sometimes have no controls and lack a good experimental design. You can see a map of the listings above. The geographic spread is more all over the globe than for many other biologics listings.

Is PRP worth it?

Patients regularly reach out to me about PRP with questions, which sparked this post.

What is PRP?

Does it work? If so, for what conditions?

What is the cost of PRP

Is it safe?

How long does it last?

These can be boiled together into whether PRP is worth it. Let’s start with some background.

What exactly is PRP?

PRP is an autologous blood product. In other words, your own blood is the source. It can come in various forms depending on how it is made. Usually a small amount of blood is centrifuged. This separates the blood components into layers. PRP comes from a middle layer.

PRP is in essence functionally a concentrated soup of your own growth factors. It also contains other molecules mainly from platelets, which are enriched above the typical concentration found in blood. This growth factor “stew” is hoped to have some therapeutic or even regenerative benefits. As a cell biologist, I can see some logic in the potential use of a concentrated prep of a patient’s own growth factors. The key is to prove a particular use is safe and effective.

I found a YouTube video below from Drew Lansdown, MD of UCSF to be very useful as a source of information. Also see my interview with him where he answered some key questions about this biologic.

Three products result from the PRP prep:

• platelet-rich plasma
• platelet-poor plasma
• red blood cells

Every given batch of the kind of platelet-rich portion is likely to vary. The characteristics depend on the protocol and the particular patient. Differences in health, age, and perhaps genetic factors can impact the quality.

Some clinic firms claim their protocol produces a more concentrated (and hence better) preparation.

Lack of standardization

Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, there is little standardization in this area, and many practitioners have no quantitative idea what’s in the syringe that they are injecting into patients. That’s got to change.

While the FDA hasn’t fully clarified whether such platelet plasma derivatives can be a drug at times, most often it appears from various agency statements and actions (or lack of action) that when it is used in a standard, stand-alone kind of way for orthopedic conditions it is probably not a drug. In this context, many uses are likely FDA-compliant, but not always.

While the agency has also approved some devices for use in preparing platelet-rich plasma, the product itself is not “FDA approved”. There’s a big difference between compliant and approved.

PRP Cost

The price varies dramatically, but I’d put the average cost that I’ve seen recently at around $1,000-$1,200 per injection. In his video, Dr. Landsdown said $500-$1,500 per injection (but remember patients often get many injections) with average per-patient total cost of $1,755. My impression is that this has gone up in recent years to around $3,000 total.

Some places will also offer a discounted series of injections from one prep from a single patient at a lower price per injection, such as $800 each for two for a total of $1,600. As another example, from one person’s individual prep they may get 4 injections in different body locations for $2,500 total. My polling (admittedly limited responses for platelet rich plasma so far) suggests some folks are paying far more than around a thousand dollars.

As a take-home on cost, Dr. Lansdown doesn’t think that most patients are getting their money’s worth for PRP:

“I think that many patients are not having a cost-effective experience with PRP. Since these injections are rarely covered by health insurance and are paid for directly by the patients, there is no real standardization for the amount charged for the injections as there is for other medications/treatments. That was part of the motivation for this study, to try and provide some relative cost based on other treatments that are commonly used for knee osteoarthritis.”

PRP for baldness and other similar issues tend to cost much more.

How long does PRP last?

As to the question of “how long does PRP last?”,  benefits mostly seem transient as in months, although longer-term studies are needed to be sure.

When I asked Lansdown about how long it lasts, he said, “It seems from the studies that we have that results may last for about 1 year. This expected duration of benefit though does need to be clarified.” If you need a new injection for $1,000 or so every six months or a year that’s going to add up. On the other hand, if it allows someone to avoid surgery, it might be worth it.

The patients I’ve talked to generally felt that any benefit only lasted 3-6 months. It is possible that longer benefit could sometimes arise from tipping the balance toward healing a long-term nagging injury or chronic inflammation, leading to lasting resolution of the issue.

What are objective views on clinical use of PRP?

It’s easy to find a lot of enthusiasm and skepticism out there on this product including from physicians.

A mostly cautionary piece from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons:

“At this time, the results of these studies are inconclusive because the effectiveness of PRP therapy can vary…Treatment with PRP could hold promise, however, current research studies to back up the claims in the media are lacking. Although PRP does appear to be effective in the treatment of chronic tendon injuries about the elbow, the medical community needs more scientific evidence before it can determine whether PRP therapy is truly effective in other conditions.”

Importantly, they note minimal risks as well. This fits my general sense from following this product for many years in that there haven’t been many mentions of safety issues in the media or published papers. That doesn’t mean it’s by definition safe, but I’d say it’s most often going to be safer than a living cell biologic.

There’s no particular reason PRP “knows” to only do helpful things though so it’s not risk-free. Still, risk seems low for orthopedic uses in particular.

Cochrane Reviews

The first, Autologous platelet-rich plasma (PRP) for chronic wounds, concludes, “The results were non-conclusive as to whether autologous PRP improves the healing of chronic wounds generally compared with standard treatment.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Then this second one, Platelet-rich therapies for musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries, is more relevant to the stem cell clinic sphere. It analyzed a set of studies finding overall:

“The quality of the evidence is very low, partly because most trials used flawed methods that mean their results may not be reliable” and concluding, “In conclusion, the available evidence is insufficient to support the use of PRT for treating musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries or show whether the effects of PRT vary according to the type of injury. Any future research in this area should bear in mind the several studies currently going on and should consider the need for standardisation of the PRP preparation”.

Again, not exactly much enthusiasm is evident there.

Admittedly these reviews are a few years old so hopefully Cochrane will do a newer analysis soon. Cochrane does have a relevant 2019 piece, but it’s a protocol and not a review.

Note that Cochrane is a charitable organization focused on providing unbiased information about medical intervention guided by evidence.

PRP Published literature

My own scanning of the literature on platelet-rich plasma finds papers with conclusions that are all over the place. The sheer number of publications (around 9,000 focused on PRP) here is striking. That much data is hard to digest.

The papers range from reports of no effect to some usually relatively moderate apparent benefit in certain cases such as in this meta-analysis. In contrast, a 2020 published meta-analysis for knee arthritis found no benefit of PRP over HA or steroid injection.

You can find a surprisingly large number of meta-analyses in this area. Sometimes asking almost the same questions, but finding different conclusions. A meta-analysis is a “high level” study of other studies. It aims to form a big-picture standpoint to see if there are consistent trends from other people’s work.

Digging into a few individual research papers myself, I found that some report usually small-to-moderate benefit of PRP over HA or steroids.

Two papers as examples

Others including some strong studies like these two don’t:

• Platelet-Rich Plasma Injections for Advanced Knee Osteoarthritis: A Prospective, Randomized, Double-Blinded Clinical Trial. A key takeaway here:

“Statistical differences between groups were not found for the majority of the outcome variables, although the magnitude of improvements tended to be greater in the PRP group.”

• Hyaluronic Acid Versus Platelet-Rich Plasma: A Prospective, Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial Comparing Clinical Outcomes and Effects on Intra-articular Biology for the Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis/ Key conclusion here from this level 1 study:

“We found no difference between HA and PRP at any time point in the primary outcome measure”

Here’s a newer piece: No benefit from PRP treatment for patients with debilitating Achilles tendon pain from Medical Express.

Overall review of PRP

My overall “meta” sense at this time is that PRP might have some moderate, mostly temporary benefit in specific cases. How that manifests will depend on how it’s prepared, how it is injected, who is making and injecting it as well as their training, and for what conditions as well as in which patients. Ideally, you’d want to consider a clinic that publishes data and has extensive experience. There aren’t many at that level.

Again, part of the problem is lack of standardization “PRP” is actually in reality probably dozens of different kinds of related products under one umbrella term.

More data are needed to move some specific applications to be the “standard of care.” A remarkable percentage of the papers out there on platelet-rich plasma end with some version of this statement, “more studies are needed.”

Notes

• Two of the largest groups in the U.S. using PRP are Regenexx and QC Kinetix.
• A PubMed search found more than 8,800 articles on this biologic.
• Note that you should discuss the potential use of PRP with your physician before making any decision. This post is not medical advice.
• Here’s an example of a university page on PRP that is quite upbeat from Johns Hopkins including on PRP for baldness.