Skin care

Your busy lifestyle leaves little time for pampering skin care. The result: Your skin isn't the baby-soft body glove with which you were born. With age, your skin gradually becomes thinner and finely wrinkled. Oil-producing (sebaceous) glands grow less active leaving your skin drier. The number of blood vessels in your skin decreases, your skin becomes more fragile, and you lose your youthful color and glow.

Good skin care — such as avoiding the sun, washing your skin gently and applying moisturizer regularly — can help delay the natural aging process and prevent many skin problems. These simple skin-care habits will help you protect your skin to keep it healthy and glowing for years to come.

The most common skin conditions associated with aging skin are things like wrinkles, age spots, and leathery skin.

• Wrinkles: Over time, the dermis loses collagen and elastin, so skin gets thinner and has trouble getting enough moisture to the epidermis. The decreased stickiness of the cells decreases the effectiveness of the barrier function allowing moisture to be released instead of being kept in the skin. This causes dryness.Oil-secreting glands also  are less efficient and the skin is slower to heal.
• Sun spots: (called also age spots or liver spots) -  these are flat areas of brown skin on the face, neck, chest, top of the hands or forearms - the areas of highest sun exposure. The color is due to pigments within the epidermis (top skin layer) cells.

Signs and Symptoms

The only symptom is the appearance of darkened spots and/or wrinkles on the skin. They do not itch and are not painful.

More about Skin care

Causes

Wrinkles

• Normal aging changes in the skin
• Facial Muscle Contractions -  Smiling, frowning, squinting and other habitual facial expressions
• Too much sun exposure - during the process, some healthy collagen fibers are damaged
• Smoking - causes a marked reduction in the production of new collagen

Sun Spots

• They are a result of your skin trying to protect itself from sun exposure by producing an overabundance of melanin (pigment in your skin responsible for splotchy or uneven tanning).This condition may be also  sign of accumulated wastes or some dysfunction.
• Heredity
• After the age of 55
• More prominent in fair-skinned people
  

Risk Factors

• Aging
• Smokers
• Sun Damage - exept wrinkles too much sun exposure also can cause age spots  If you have a lot of them, you should check with a dermatologist because they indicate that you’ve had considerable sun damage and may therefore be more at risk for skin cancer.
  

Diagnosis
You can diagnose wrinkles and age spots yourself by their appearance. If you are concerned about changes in your skin, contact your doctor. He or she can do tests to rule out other diseases.Treatment Approach

Wrinkles:

• Over-the-counter treatment options for wrinkles, including various creams and lotions.
• Prescription treatments, including the retinoid cream - Renova
• Dermabrasion (scraping layers away)
• Chemical peels (dissolving skin away)
• Laser skin resurfacing
• Botox collagen and other injections
• Plastic surgery

Sun spots:

• For cosmetic reasons, age spots can be lightened with skin-bleaching products or removed by freezing with liquid nitrogen (cryotherapy).
• Re-occurrence or appearance of new spots may be minimized by using a high-protection sunscreen lotion (SPF 15 or greater)Sunscreen should be applied at least one-half hour before sun exposure and it should be reapplied frequently.
• Over-the-counter
• Prescription treatments

Medications

Skin care Medications

• Retin-A