Current Concepts of Prolotherapy in Orthopedic Surgery

Context: Prolotherapy is a popular injection-based complementary treatment, which has shown promising results in the treatment of sprained and degenerated ligaments, and damaged dense connective tissues’ structures. More research was conducted in this area and many authors declared successful results for different indications.
Evidence Acquisition: The purpose of this study was to present a literature review regarding the current concepts of prolotherapy injections and improvements in the orthopedic clinical care practice. The Medline and PubMed databases were searched for the articles related to prolotherapy injections in the field of orthopedic surgery and additionally the reference list of each article was also included to provide a comprehensive evaluation.
Numerous studies have been conducted on prolotherapy injections for different indications for orthopedics clinical care practice. Prolotherapy injections have successfully used for major orthopedic procedures in terms of rotator cuff lesions, knee ligamentous lesions, osteoarthritis-cartilage defects, and ligament-tendon injuries. Most of the studies showed that prolotherapy provided faster and better healing of tissues.
There is a great interest to prolotherapy in orthopedic clinics, especially to manage musculoskeletal lesions. More research conducted in this area and many authors declared successful results in their studies. In spite of this increasing trend for prolotherapy injections, there were only one or two clinical studies investigated prolotherapy injections for different indications and most of them have limited participants, short-term follow-up or poor quality studies. There is still need for further high-quality studies investigated optimal strategy of the injections of prolotherapy.