Removing Age Spots – Some Effective Treatments

This hub introduces some of the methods can be used to remove age spots, as well as some basic knowledge of why age spots appear.

Many older people have brown spots on the surface of their skin, the spots can be grown on the face or back of their hands. This is what we often called age spots (or senile plaques). Most people begin to have age spots at around the age of 50, age spots are more common among older people who begin to gain weight or in menopausal women who are more vulnerable to age spots.

How do age spots occur?

Most people will have more and more age spots as they grow older, at the same time, the age spots area is also gradually increasing. So, how do age spots appear? What are the main causes? Generally speaking, there are three possible reasons that have been considered to be closely related to the formation of age spots. The first one thinks that, when people are getting old, their bodies begin to have lower metabolism, this will cause accelerated cell function decline over a period of time, it also tends to slow blood circulation. The above factor coupled with the dietary changes, such as changed proportion of animals and plants in the diet, disorder of fat intake and so on, produce a substance called lipofuscin (lipofuscin is also called age pigment, it’s a substance that consist of yellow autofluorescent granules, it only appears in unstained tissues), lipofuscin has tiny brown particles accumulated in the basal layer of skin cells. These brown particles are the products of the process of lipid peroxidation. Aging cells lose their functional to decompose these particles, leading to excess accumulation of brown granules in the basal layer of the cells in the human body, thus forming age spots on the surface of the skin.

The second view is that, the activity of superoxide dismutase – a type of anti-peroxidation substance – is reduced, thus relatively increasing the amount of free radicals in the human body, free radicals can stimulate peroxidation and in the long-term, tend to poison the body tissues. There is also another theory, in which sunlight exposure and chronic inflammation of the skin are largely blamed for the appearance of age spots. It’s more like the seborrheic keratosis (a benign form of skin tumor in older people), with lipofuscin pigment patches on the skin mainly due to long-term exposure to sunlight and skin aging and inflammations. Age spots are harbingers of aging, lots of age spots on the skin show that the body has entered the aging stage.

How to prevent and remove age spots?

Although age spots are benign in nature and will not pose any danger to the health, however, they can change people’s looking, indicate aging and easy to bring psychological pressure on the elderly. In order to prevent and remove age spots, you can try the following methods:

1, To prevent age spots, first and foremost, you should stay away from direct sunlight exposure and abnormal stimulations on the skin. You are recommended to use sunscreen to reduce sun exposure and any facial skin irritation. In case there is a rash on the skin, do not scratch as this will only worsen the situation and increase the growth of age spots. To prevent the formation of age spots, it is best to adjust the fat content of the diet, so that the total fat intake account for no more than 50% of the total calories. At the same time, you can also take some anti-aging drugs, such as vitamin E, which can prevent the formation of lipofuscin, scavenge free radicals and prolong life.

In addition to taking a certain amount of vitamin E, older people can also eat a lot of foods rich in vitamin E, such as vegetable oil, grains, beans, dark green plants as well as liver, eggs and dairy products. The elderly can prevent age spots by adjusting their diets and eating more fruits, fresh green vegetables and carrots, potatoes, leeks, cabbage, etc., and eat less greasy food, all these foods have been proved to be very effective in the prevention of age spots.

2, there is very little possibility of malignant transformation of age spots, so age spots do not need to be treated, however, you should be very careful to distinguish age spots from melanoma, as the latter has a higher chance of turning into malignancy (usually a sign of malignancy is a sudden increase or spread out of the pigments on the skin, it should be treated immediately). Generally, since age spots are not malignant, they do not require any treatment, however, for those who want to look younger, frozen or laser treatment can be used in removing age spots.

3, laser age spot treatment is by far the most effective method to get rid of age spot safely, the technology uses a focused, high pulsed laser beams to reach cells with deep colors and large pigment molecules, the high-energy laser beams will, instantly, break the large colored spots into very tiny pigments, and through the absorption of laser energy, destruct the age spots pigments. Usually, the treatment only needs to be done once and the results will last for a long time without leaving scars on the skin surface.

4, if there is a small number of age spots on the skin, you can also take freezing method, or cryotherapy, to freeze off the spots.

5, fluorouracil cream can also be used externally to remove age spots.