Autologous Blood Injection

Autologous blood injection (ABI) is an injection of a small volume of the patient's own unspun whole blood into or around a painful tendon. The rationale is that growth factors in blood will restart a stalled healing response.

It is the simplest and oldest blood-derived orthobiologic: it needs no centrifuge or commercial kit, and it was widely used at the lateral elbow before platelet-rich plasma (PRP) largely displaced it. In sport and exercise medicine (SEM) its main value now is conceptual, because it shows the orthobiologic idea in its simplest form and why the evidence is so hard to interpret.

This page covers the procedure, what UK guidance and the trials say, and how it compares with PRP.