Vitality News Health Articles

In people and domestic pets, scarring in the skin after trauma, surgery, burns or a sports injury is a major health problem, usually resulting in unsightly aesthetics, loss of function, restriction of tissue elasticity and/or growth and negative psychological effects.

Current treatments are strictly empirical, troublesome and unpredictable. There are no prescription medicines for the avoidance or treatment of dermal scarring. Skin wounds on early mammalian embryos cure perfectly with no scars, whereas wounds to adult mammals are prone to scarring.

In scar treatment research, scientists are exploring the cellular and molecular differences between perfect healing in embryonic wounds and scar-forming healing in adult wounds. Important differences include the inflammatory response, which in embryonic wounds consists of fewer quantities of less differentiated inflammatory cells. This occurrence, together with augmented levels of morphogenetic molecules implicated in skin growth and morphogenesis, implies that the growth factor profile of an embryonic injury is highly different from that of an adult injury.

These experiments resulted in scar-less healing in the adult subject and have lead to the identification of appropriate therapeutic targets. It has been found that effective skin care markedly improves or completely avoids scarring during adult injury healing in experimental animals. Some of these new medications have satisfyingly passed safety and other tests, such that they have entered human medical trials with approval from the appropriate regulatory authorities. Based on auspicious results from such volunteer experiments, the leading medications have now entered human patient-based trials e.g. in skin graft donor sites.

Proposing Solutions

The theory is that evolutionary factors have been exerted on medium sized, widespread, dirty wounds with considerable tissue destruction e.g. bites, bruises and contusions. Modern wounds (e.g. produced by trauma or surgery) caused by sharp instruments, are recent situations not previously encountered in nature, in which the evolutionary selected wound healing responses are somewhat useless. It has been shown that both healing with scarring and regeneration can occur within the same animal, including man, and indeed within the same tissue, thereby implying that they share similar procedures and regulators.

Consequently, by subtly altering the ratio of growth factors present during adult wound healing, we can induce adult wounds to heal perfectly with no scars, with accelerated healing and with no negative effects, e.g. on wound strength or wound infection rates. This implies that scarring may no longer be an inevitable sequel of modem injury or surgery, and that a completely new pharmaceutical concept to the avoidance of human scarring is now possible. Not only skin suffers from scarring; they can appear in many other tissues as well.

Thus scar-improving drugs could have widespread benefits and prevent complications in several tissues, e.g. the prevention of blindness after scarring due to eye damage, facilitation of neuronal reconnections in the central and peripheral nervous system by the elimination of glial scarring, recovery of normal gut and reproductive function by preventing strictures and adhesions after damage to the gastrointestinal or reproductive tracts, and the restoration of locomotor function by preventing scarring in tendons and ligaments.

Scars caused by wounds, burns or surgeries can now be easily eliminated. Take advantage of our all-natural skin care system and say good-bye to even your worst scar nightmares.

- Danna Finnerand