Offence for doctor who rejuvenates skin with platelet-enriched blood outside licensed facilities

Theaesthetic doctor who performsbiorevititalisation on patients outsidelicensed facilities risks aprison sentence. In fact, the rules on the processing ofblood and plasma, even if from the same patient, and used locally and not intravenously, must be respected. The Court of Cassation thus upheld the eight-month imprisonment sentence and 200 euro fine, plus accessory penalties, with suspended sentence, for the white coat who, for a fee of 300 euro, had injected plasma enriched with platelets into the face of a patient.

The treatment, widely practised and known as Prp, is aimed at cell regeneration. Blood taken from the patient and enriched with the growth factors present in platelets is injected into the face, arms, neck and inner thighs to rejuvenate tissue. A practice that has come into the crosshairs of the Supreme Court, according to which, the use of this technique cannot be performed without complying with all regulations on the collection, harvesting and processing of blood components, without authorisation and outside approved facilities.

The Supreme Court rejected the defence's argument that the court had mistakenly equated biorevitalization with autologous transfusions, because the former, unlike the latter, is not performed intravenously but with local injections to regenerate tissues, and would therefore be outside the scope of the regulation (Legislative Decree 261/2007) that dictates the rules for the quality of human blood and its components.

Instead, the legitimacy judges clarified that the law protects the safety of patients, not only in the transfusion phase, but also in that of the collection, collection, and processing of blood and blood derivatives, whatever their use. For the Court of Cassation, there is therefore no doubt that Article 24 of Legislative Decree 261/2007, which punishes those who operate illegally in the transfusion sector, has been violated.

In the Court's opinion, this is the case. In the doctor's office, during a search, a centrifuge, test tubes, some of them with blood waste, syringes and containers with medical waste had been found. Material, according to the defence, compatible with the activity of an aesthetic doctor practising infiltrations ofhyaluronic acid, fillers and botulinum toxin. On the other hand, the Supreme Court condemned an activity illegally carried out outside a contracted facility, without 'control by the competent transfusion service and without evidence of compliance with the 60ml limit for each individual procedure'.