As a traditional treatment invented in the 1970s, the usage of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) has been reported constantly in many medical areas, such as tissue regeneration, wound healing, ligament repair, hair loss, and so on. In this review, we focus on the administration of PRP in musculoskeletal recovery. As a part of autogenous blood plasma, PRP's platelet concentration is above the baseline. It is extracted from the host's blood sample collected before centrifugal separation. The history, mechanism and preparation of PRP, and existing clinical applications of it will become a helper for clinicians to better understand this therapy. However, the molecular mechanism of PRP treatment is still under debate. On the other hand, because of the safety concern during the PRP's preparation, the practical application of PRP is only applied in many rare cases, especially in spinal diseases. In this paper, we attempt to make a better understanding of the mechanism of PRP and the preparation of PRP; meanwhile, to raise existing questions about further application of PRP in the future. We recommend that PRP should be used in spinal diseases and other fields and in the future we ought to find a safe, simple, and standardized PRP preparation protocol.
Keywords: Platelet-rich plasma (PRP); molecular mechanism; musculoskeletal; spinal disease.