Vitiligo
Read more about Vitiligo
presented in simple
easy to understand language
Vitiligo is a condition in which your skin loses melanin, the
pigment that determines the color of your skin, hair and eyes. If
the cells that produce melanin die or no longer form melanin, slowly
growing white patches of irregular shapes appear on your skin.
Vitiligo usually starts as small areas of pigment loss that spread
and become larger with time. These changes in your skin can result
in stress and worries about your appearance. There is no cure for
vitiligo. The goal of treatment is to stop or slow the progression
of depigmentation and, if you desire, attempt to return some color
to your skin. It’s a condition where the skin looses its color and
becomes pale. It is caused by the removal of melanin from the skin
which is the pigment that determines the color of the skin. The
vitiligo starts as small white patches of pigment loss which then
spreads to other parts of the body. There is no wonder drug for
vitiligo however there are several therapies which might help in
decreasing the spread of the depigmentation but most of them take
from six to eighteen months in order to show some satisfactory
results.
Causes of Vitiligo
Human skin contains melanin, a dark pigment produced from the amino
acid tyrosine by pigment cells known as melanocytes. Melanin is the
pigment that determines the physical appearances like color of skin,
hair, and eyes. It is produced in cells called melanocytes. If
melanocytes cannot form melanin or if their number decreases, skin
color will progressively fade resulting in a paler whitish look. If
skin Affected by vitiligo is examined under the microscope, the
melanocytes are absent and there are signs of inflammation in the
deeper layer of the skin.
Treatment of Vitiligo
Treatment choices of vitiligo depend on the conditions and amount of
area infected and how widespread they are. Also each and every
person responds differently to treatment .a particular therapy might
work for you but for another person it might not. So treatment
normally runs as a trial and an error process until the one that
works for that particular person is found out.
1. Tropical cortico steroid therapy
2. Topical psoralenplus ultraviolet
3. Narrow band ultraviolet b
4. Oral psoralen photo chemotherapy
5. Skin grafting
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