What was done
A 6 year old boy presented two months after trauma with pulp necrosis in both maxillary central incisors. The clinicians at Ege University revitalized both teeth but with different scaffolds: tooth 11 received leukocyte platelet-rich fibrin (L-PRF, spun from venous blood at 3,000 rpm for 10 minutes and inserted after apical microbleeding), tooth 21 received the conventional blood clot, induced by passing a size 30 K-file 2 mm beyond the apex. Both were sealed with white MTA. At 3 months the blood clot tooth developed pain and a sinus tract and was retreated: re-disinfection, a metronidazole dressing at 0.5 mg/mL, then a second bleeding induction. The authors say plainly that this makes the report a descriptive within-patient observation, not a controlled comparison of scaffolds. That sentence does a lot of work, and it should.
What 80 months showed
At 28 months both incisors were asymptomatic and both responded to electric pulp testing, the blood clot tooth at a lower threshold (3/10) than the PRF tooth (6/10). At 56 months the blood clot tooth fractured at the crown along a pre-existing crack and was restored elsewhere. At 80 months the picture had inverted from the early radiographs: the PRF tooth no longer responded to sensibility testing and, per the abstract, had developed an apical radiolucency, while the blood clot tooth gave an early response (19/64) and showed no apical pathology, though its crown had discolored. Eighty months is the point of this paper. Most published revitalization series stop at or before five years, and the authors note that late complications such as reinfection, obliteration, and loss of sensibility can surface only after that window closes.
The paper disagrees with itself about the early period
The abstract states that early outcomes favored PRF, with greater maturation and apical closure by 12 to 28 months, and that the blood clot tooth showed partial closure and canal obliteration. The case description states the opposite: the blood clot tooth showed dentinal wall thickening at 3 months, more advanced maturation at 6, and superior apical closure at 12, while the PRF tooth displayed partial closure and canal narrowing. One of the two passages has the labels crossed, and the paper gives no way to tell which, since the radiographs were assessed qualitatively and could not be standardized because of limited patient cooperation. The 80-month findings are consistent between abstract and body, so the long-term conclusion stands, but any citation of this case for an early scaffold advantage, in either direction, is citing an unstable claim. We flag the discrepancy rather than resolve it.
What this adds, and what it cannot
One patient, one confounding retreatment, an unknown initial injury: this case cannot show that PRF fails or that a plain clot wins. What it adds is the longest follow-up we have logged for scaffold choice in revitalization, and a concrete instance of early radiographic maturation failing to predict long-term pulp status. That is consistent with the animal-level record, where platelet concentrates showed no advantage over a plain blood clot across controlled studies (/analysis/platelet-derivatives-versus-blood-clot/). For the pulp repair route (/programs/pulp-dentin-repair/) the practical reading is unchanged but sharpened: scaffold comparisons reported at 12 or 24 months are provisional, and trial designs in this route need endpoints that survive past year five. The current state of the field is at /field/.
Provenance: every claim above traces to the published case report at the DOI cited, per our method at /method/.