Pain and discomfort in your face and jaw can be a real drag — especially when it’s affecting your everyday life. Your joints and tendons could be what’s causing your pain, but what are you supposed to do? Finding relief may seem impossible, but you do have options. One innovative approach for joint and tendon pain is PRF, or platelet-rich fibrin.

At The Snoring and Sleep Apnea Center, located in Seattle, Washington, we’re experts in facial pain and TMJ disorders. Dr. Katharine Christian is our in-house sleep medicine dentist, who offers a variety of treatments to help you kick your facial pain for good.

Causes of Joint and Tendon Pain in Your Face

When you’re suffering from pain in your face or jaw, it can be due to a number of different issues. However, no matter what the problem is, you want to find relief quickly. Facial pain really can interrupt your daily life. 

Some causes of facial pain are chronic, while others are acute in nature, coming on quickly and causing severe discomfort. Some of the common causes of pain in your face include:

TMJ Disorders

TMJ disorders affect your jaw’s temporomandibular joint. This joint is the junction between your skull and your lower jawbone, and it allows you to move your jaw side-to-side and to open and close your mouth.

A TMJ disorder happens when something goes wrong in your joint, causing pain and other issues. Most often, TMJ disorders happen from injury, teeth grinding, or degenerative conditions like arthritis.

Injuries

Acute injuries to your jaw are another reason you may have joint or tendon pain. Injuries may be caused by a trauma such as a direct blow to your face or a car accident. The pain may last for years after the injury, especially when your joint is involved.

Arthritis

Arthritis is a common problem that can affect any of the joints in your body. There are many different types of arthritis, including osteoarthritis. This type of arthritis happens when the protective cartilage in your joint erodes away over time. 

Teeth Grinding or Clenching

Grinding your teeth at night is something you likely can’t control. The same goes for clenching your teeth. Both of these conditions put excess stress and pressure on your joints, muscles, and tendons, often leading to headaches and pain in your face.

Connective tissue diseases and obstructive sleep apnea are other reasons you may be experiencing pain in your jaw or face. 

What is PRF?

PRF, or platelet-rich fibrin, is a type of regenerative medicine that’s used to improve pain and heal damaged tissues in your body. It’s similar to platelet-rich plasma, however, PRF is more concentrated in platelets and growth factors.

Both PRF and PRP start with collecting a sample of your blood; however, once the blood is placed in the centrifuge, it’s spun down much slower for PRF than it is for PRP. This allows for some of the white blood cells and stem cells to remain in the plasma and platelet mixture instead of forcing them to the bottom of the tube.

Injecting a concentrated serum that contains more platelets, stem cells, and white blood cells helps to speed up the healing process, and it can work even faster than traditional PRP treatments. 

How PRF Gets Rid of Your Pain

Platelet-rich fibrin is a great way to not only relieve pain in your joints and tendons, but also to regenerate damaged tissue. Because the platelets are more numerous in PRF, there are far more growth factors released, which speeds up the healing process in your joints and tissues.

PRF is also unique because there’s no anticoagulant added to prevent clots. This allows for the formation of a fibrin from fibrinogen that naturally occurs in your blood. The fibrin forms a type of cellular matrix that triggers the platelets to start releasing growth factors slowly over a longer period of time, which can result in better healing and longer-lasting positive effects.

If you’d like to learn more about PRF to address your facial pain, don’t hesitate to call our office at (206) 770-0260. You can also request an appointment using our online booking tool.