Generic Allegra

Rough buffing of the skin does a better job of removing wrinkles and acne scars and stimulating healing than a gentler rubbing, University of Michigan researchers report.

Known as microdermabrasion, skin buffing has become a popular way to improve the appearance of wrinkles, acne scars, skin discoloration and other signs of aging skin. The procedure involves buffing the skin with grains of diamond or another hard substance such as aluminum oxide crystals, the researchers explain.

Laser resurfacing is considered the “gold standard” for removing wrinkles, acne scars and skin discoloration, but it requires a long healing period after treatment and can sometimes leave the skin damaged, said study leader Dr. Darius J. Karimipour, an assistant professor of dermatology at Michigan.

But with microdermabrasion, he said, the skin heals quickly. Someone could have a treatment at lunchtime and return to work with only a little redness. The researchers’ goal was to make microdermabrasion more effective, he said.

“We came up with the idea of a more aggressive approach,” Karimipour said. “If we treated the skin more aggressively with microdermabrasion, we could generate more collagen.”

The key to improving the appearance of skin is to have the treatment induce the production of collagen, which is an important skin protein, Karimipour explained. Earlier studies had found that aluminum oxide microdermabrasion does not always stimulate collagen production, but he said it was not known if that could be achieved with a more abrasive substance.

To find out, Karimipour’s team took skin samples from the arms of 40 people with sun-damaged skin. Samples were taken before and after the participants had microdermabrasion with either a coarse- or medium-grit, diamond-studded wand.

The researchers found that the course-grit diamond increased the production of compounds associated with wound healing and skin remodeling. These included cytokeratin 16, which helps skin heal after injury.

In addition, the coarse-grit buffing produced antimicrobial peptides that fight infection and substances that break down the skin’s structural proteins to let the skin rebuild. The researchers also found that skin produced other substances that induce collagen production.

These changes were not seen in skin treated with the medium-grit device, they noted.

Their findings are published in the October issue of Archives of Dermatology.

“This research gives us the basis to believe that aggressive microdermabrasion abrasion could potentially result in beneficial effects like we see in other more aggressive procedures, like laser resurfacing,” Karimipour said.

However, he predicted that aggressive microdermabrasion would not replace laser resurfacing. Microdermabrasion is not for the most severe cases but rather for fine-line wrinkles and shallow acne scars, he said.

Dr. Jeffrey Salomon, an assistant clinical professor of plastic surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, said that “the more damage induced to the skin, by whatever mechanism, the stronger the body’s repair response.”

For microdermabrasion-induced injury, coarseness of the grit is only one part of the picture, Salomon said. “The duration of application, pressure applied during the application and the recipient skin thickness are also parameters, just like different grit of sandpaper are used for different types of wood and different types of applications,” he said.

Treating the skin first with chemical peeling agents can reduce the amount of grit needed to get a skin-repair response equivalent to that of a coarser-grit wand, Salomon said.

“So there are a variety of parameters that can be manipulated to achieve equivalent results, independent of the coarseness of the grit,” he said. “In the end, you do need to induce an injury to the skin to get objective evidence of skin rejuvenation.”

Worldwide immunization rates are at their highest-ever levels, a new report shows.

A record number of vaccines — 120 — are now available to prevent deadly diseases, and more than 80 new vaccines are in late-stage clinical testing, according to the report scheduled to be released Wednesday by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank.

A record 106 million infants were immunized in 2008, reversing a downward trend. Measles deaths worldwide decreased 74 percent between 2000 and 2007, the report authors noted.

“Such progress must inspire new efforts to immunize children around the globe against life-threatening diseases,” UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman, said in a news release.

Along with the good news, the “State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization” report also said rich nations need to contribute more to eliminate an annual $1 billion funding gap that leaves about 24 million children at risk, particularly in the poorest nations and communities.

Recently developed vaccines include those to protect against meningococcal meningitis, rotavirus diarrhea, pneumococcal disease and human papillomavirus (HPV). Vaccines now in late-stage testing include more than 30 that target diseases for which no vaccine currently exists. Researchers are also working to create vaccines against HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and dengue.

The report also said that manufacturers in developing countries now fill 86 percent of the demand for traditional vaccines such as those that protect against measles, whooping cough, tetanus and diphtheria.

“We have seen a dramatic turnaround in the availability of vaccines in even the poorest countries,” Graeme Wheeler, managing director of the World Bank Group, said in the news release. “Yet the international community, together with the countries themselves, must ensure that new and existing technologies actually reach the most vulnerable populations, especially children.”

A new study suggests that the cancer drug Gleevec may benefit people with scleroderma, a chronic connective tissue disease.

No effective treatment currently exists for scleroderma, which affects the skin, blood vessels and often muscles and joints, as well as the gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, heart and lungs. About 300,000 people in the United States have scleroderma, which typically strikes people between the ages of 30 and 50, according to the Scleroderma Foundation.

This study included 30 patients with diffuse scleroderma, a widespread, severe form of the disease. They took 400 milligrams of Gleevec a day and were evaluated monthly for 12 months during treatment and were seen for follow-up three months after they stopped taking the drug.

The researchers assessed the effectiveness of the drug treatment by using a tool called the modified Rodnan skin score, a measure of how much skin is affected by the disease.

“The skin score seems to be a very good marker of disease status and most scleroderma trials use this as an outcome measure,” study leader Dr. Robert Spiera, an associate attending rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, said in a hospital news release.

They also used two tests (forced vital capacity and diffusion capacity) to measure patients’ lung function. Lung disease is one of the main causes of death in scleroderma patients.

Interim findings showed a 23 percent improvement in skin scores and improvements in the lung function tests — 9.6 percent in forced vital capacity scores and 11 percent to 18 percent in diffusion capacity scores.

“The lung function data was really exciting,” Spiera said. “In patients with scleroderma, you usually see lung function tests getting worse over time, and if doctors try a therapy for a year and a patient doesn’t get any worse, we get pretty excited. What is amazing to me in this study is that we actually saw improvements in both lung function tests.”

The interim results were presented Sunday at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting in Philadelphia. The study received funding and donated drugs from Novartis, which makes Gleevec.

The drug is approved in the United States to treat two types of cancer — chronic myeloid leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumor.

New research links high blood pressure in children to bones that are more mature than average, suggesting that advanced bone age may predict cardiovascular problems.

The new study, published Oct. 19 in the journal Hypertension, looked at children and found that those without high blood pressure had bones that reflected their chronological age within four months.

But in kids with high blood pressure, there was an average difference of nearly two years between “bone age” (16 years) and chronological age (14 years).

“Accelerated maturation is not the same as precocious puberty, the onset of signs of puberty before age 7 or 8 in girls and age 9 in boys,” study co-author Dr. Mieczyslaw Litwin, scientific director of Children’s Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw, Poland, said in a statement. “Accelerated maturation means that the tempo of biological maturity is greater than average. We found that accelerated skeletal maturation may be the early tell-tale sign of developing hypertension.”

The study authors examined bone age in the 108 Polish white children in the study by examining X-rays of wrists of the left hand. They compared the maturity of the bone structure to a reference atlas.

The researchers report that they found that the bone structures were mature in 20 of 54 children without high blood pressure, but 48 of the 54 with it.

“It is difficult to imagine that the process of biological maturity can be reversed,” Litwin said. “But we think that some lifestyle modifications, such as increased physical activity and diet modification, can influence both metabolic abnormalities and the tempo of biological maturity.”