Making PRP with Vacutainers

Hi i'm Daniel Zengel with PRP labs and today i'm going to be talking about vacutainers and why they should not be used to make PRP. So first of all what is a vacutainer? These are test tubes made by Becton Dickinson also known as BD and vacutainers come in many different styles. These are yellow-top vacutainers

they have an ACD-A solution you will see all different color vacutainers they have some with red tops, some with tiger tops - all the different colors indicate a different purpose for the vacutainer. However none of the vacutainer's are suitable for making PRP and there's two main reasons why that is. The first reason is that all vacutainers contain endotoxins. And you

don't need to take my word for it you can look this up right on BD's website. If you look at the frequently asked questions section on BD.com you'll see the fifth question down asks Are BD vacutainer blood collection tubes endotoxin free? and the answer is a very unequivocal: No BD does not claim that

any of the vacutainer blood collection tubes are endotoxin free. Alright, so that's number one and that really should be enough reason not to use a vacutainer to make PRP. You do not want to inject endotoxins into your patients and that should be enough of a reason for just about anyone. But in case you needed

another reason not to use vacutainers to make PRP, keep this in mind: vacutainers are not FDA cleared to make PRP. These are class 1 medical devices and if you were to look on the FDA's website at the vacutainer product code you'll see that these are intended for general chemistry and testing purposes. So if you want to

put your patients blood in a vacutainer to run some labs maybe you see what their iron levels are maybe see how much vitamin D they have in their blood, that'd be a great use for a vacutainer. But these are not cleared by the FDA to hold any liquid that's going to be injected back into a