Dr.Shashidhar has the distinction of being the first dentist in Chennai to introduce Concentrated Growth Factor (CGF) therapy, a breakthrough technology in painless dentistry.

What Is It? (The Short Answer)

The basic idea: Blood contains certain specific components (called growth factors) which are part of the natural wound healing process. If these can be applied in a concentrated form to wounded tissues or surgical sites, it has the potential to accelerate healing.

Concentrated Growth Factors (CGF) therapy involves using your body’s own regenerative abilities to accelerate the growth of new soft tissue and bone in the surgical area. This ability of CGF makes it very useful in dental surgeries such as implants. By accelerating the healing process, CGF reduces the time between receiving the implant and placement of a dental prosthetic (crown, bridge, or denture).

What Is It? (A Longer, More Informative Answer)

To better understand CGF, let’s first familiarize ourselves with some terminology:

• Regenerative Medicine: Combines many aspects of medicine (cell & molecular biology, biomaterials and tissue engineering) to create (regenerate) living tissues to repair or replace lost tissue.
• Growth factors: Any of a group of proteins that stimulate cell growth and tissue repair.
• Haemostasis: The body’s natural process of wound healing that stops bleeding. It involves a coordinated effort between platelets and blood clotting proteins (platelet-derived growth factors).
• Platelets: One of the components of blood. Play a critical role in haemostasis as they are a rich source of certain specific ‘growth factors’.
• Autologous: Obtained from the same individual.

Modern surgery has two main goals - low invasiveness and faster clinical healing. Regenerative surgery, which combines surgical procedures with regenerative medicine, helps attain these goals. One such important tool of regenerative medicine is CGF. CGF therapy involves using your body’s own regenerative abilities to accelerate the growth of new soft tissue and bone in the surgical area.

Basic idea behind CGF therapy: Blood contains certain specific components which are part of the natural wound healing process. If these components can be applied in a concentrated form to wounded tissues or surgical sites, it has the potential to accelerate healing. Some of these components which are contained within platelets are growth factors such as PDGF (platelet-derived growth factor) and TGFß (transforming growth factor beta) which are collectively referred to as platelet growth factors (PGF). They regulate cell growth and division.

The Process:

The patient’s own blood is taken and placed in a centrifuge machine to separate the PGF from red blood cells (RBC). The resulting product is CGF, an autologous biomaterial that concentrates a large number of PGF and CD34+ stem cells (besides WBCs) in a small volume of blood plasma. In a concentrated form, these growth factors help accelerate the rate of growth of new soft tissue and bone in the surgical area. In dental surgery, CGF is mixed into gels and applied to treatment sites.

In surgery, it often becomes necessary to accelerate the healing process. The ability of CGF procedures to use the body’s own regenerative abilities to accelerate the growth of bone and soft tissue makes it very useful in certain dental treatments such as:

• Dental implants: CGF therapy can reduce the time between implant placement and fitting of a dental prosthetic (crown, bridge, or denture).Normally, 3-6 months of healing time is needed after placement of an implant screw to allow for successful osseointegration (the biological process of fusing living bone and artificial implant). Only then can a dental prosthetic be fitted atop the implant. By accelerating the healing process, CGF can reduce this time span to just 45-60 days, a reduction of at least 60%. Thus, CGF helps make dental implants and other restorative dental procedures a natural yet faster process.
• For filling cystic cavities
• For soft tissue regeneration in case of gingival grafts
• For treating periodontics ligament diseases For use in oral and maxillofacial surgery (e.g., jaw reconstruction and TMJ disorders)
• For use in cosmetic surgery

Is CGF Safe?

Yes. CGF is proven to besafe and effective in surgical applications:

• Allergic reactions or infections are unlikely since the patient’s own blood is used; CGF is an autologous biomaterial.
• CGF has antimicrobial properties due to its high concentration of leukocytes (white blood cells/WBCs ─ cells of the immune system that defend the body against disease).
• Minimal risk present as the healing process is fully natural since CGF procedures use the body’s own regenerative abilities.

However, it is important that the patient is properly screened by the dentist to determine their suitability for CGF therapy. Patients suffering with conditions causing platelets deficiency (e.g., anemia) or who are under anticoagulant medication may not be suitable candidates for CGF therapy.