Everyone knows what age spots are; but to me, they can only mean reminders of aging. They say the age spots show up even in young adults but they make their appearances usually after 40-45 years of living. Be that as it may, they are there to remind you that you should be taking ever the more care of your skin.
Well, now let’s get off to some serious stuff about age spots. Stuffs like why and how do they appear and during the course of this article, try to find answers to questions such as are they harmful and what can be done about them.
Age spots in their real meaning and composition are just concentrated spots of the characteristic skin pigment melanin. Localized melanin concentrations due to aging and/or exposure to sunlight are cousins of wrinkles. By appearance, the spots are flat and simple brown, harmless patches sitting pretty all over our bodies where Sun exposure was high. Age spots are also called by names such as solar lentigo and liver spots.
The mechanism of age spots is pretty simple to understand. What we think of as pretty normal process of aging gets a big boost with increased exposure to Sun which damages the elasticity of skin by damaging a particular form of fibers called as elastins. Damaged elastins will not be in any position to hold skin firm in position, this is when we see sagging and wrinkling because of the lost elasticity. Ultraviolet rays of sunlight are to blame for this which they do to everything under them. The melanin concentrations in age spots are particularly due to increase in the amount of that pigment and definitely not due to rearranging of the available melanin, a fact you can immediately notice by looking around the age spots that still appear normal.
Of course, age spots aren’t harmful but they sure can be signs of a future possibility of skin cancer. But don’t loose heart, just yet; age spots aren’t going to turn into skin cancers, at least not in every case. But if and when they do, doctors will be able to identify the precancerous and cancerous lesions before hand.
But there are a couple of more ways by which age spots can be a little harmful although there is not much to fear them as they are mostly curable. These ‘harmful’ effects include, benign tumors, freckles, general discoloration of skin or yellowing as some people call and dilation of small veins or blood vessels. See a doc and you are done with them.
Recent Comments