Does Lidocaine reduce effectiveness of PRP?

Hi Alicia77,

I am Sarah, a medical assistant at Aesthetic Skin MD with Dr. Anil Shah, and we work with PRP injections almost daily. With our treatments, our providers will numb locally with lidocaine to reduce the pain from the PRP injections, which can be quite painful. If the lidocaine reduced the effects of PRP, we would not numb with it unless a patient requested for it. Fortunately, lidocaine does not reduce the effects of PRP and is perfectly safe to use before a treatment. If you are interested in starting or continuing treatments, we specialize in PRP injections at our office in Chicago, Illinois. I hope your journey with PRP is a successful one.

In general, Lidocaine interferes with the platelet function, it is why it is not used during the PRP injection but there is clinical significance that Lidocaine 1% and ropivacaine 0.5% can be used at up to a 1:1 ratio with platelet preparations to reduce the pain and discomfort of PRP procedures while maintaining platelet therapeutic potential.


Best of luck !

Lidocaine can be injectable, not just topical, so you don't need to wipe it off. However, it is not recommended with PRP. Bupivicaine, tetracaine or marcane can be used in variety of combinations topiocally that can be made by a compounding pharmacy. They are also available as injectables.

Hello and thank you for your question. In my experience Lidocaine does not reduce the effectiveness of PRP, if it did I would assume a doctor would not use it. I hope this helps.

Dr. T

The few studies suggesting that lidocaine interferes with platelet function demonstrate a very minimal impact on PRP therapy—and because topical analgesics like lidocaine are administered in such small amounts during injection, this effect would be considered insignificant. At our clinic, nearly all patients opt to use lidocaine during PRP therapy for hair loss, and we see exceptional results with no correlation to the use of analgesics. Additionally, most PRP practitioners offer, and even default, to using lidocaine, so you shouldn’t need to apply it before your appointment.

Hello I'm Dr. Wipawan Vathananai, a co-worker of Dr. Kulakarn Amonpattana, from BHI Clinic, Bangkok, Thailand. Regarding your concern about lidocaine effect on PRP effectiveness, according to my experience, I've seen very good result despite the patients were administered lidocaine prior to PRP injection. The anesthesia is usually put around the area that will be injected or is performed as occipital and supraorbital nerve blocks which are not the area where PRP will be injected. I've never done anesthetic cream for PRP injection since the penetration through the hair and scalp might not be enough to do all the injections. Because Lidocaine is injected into the scalp therefore it cannot be taken off by rubbing or cleaning the scalp. I hope my answer helps.