Say Goodbye to Wrinkles With CO2
February 15th, 2008 Posted by: Dr. Cox
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Carbon dioxide gets a lot flack. Itâs a culprit responsible for the growing hole in our ozone layer, leading to skin cancer, climate change and global warming. But CO2 has a surprising new role: reducing wrinkles and clearing up acne scars!
Trials of a new carbon dioxide-based fractional laser are underway at two medical centers in the United States. The laser — recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — is designed to treat facial wrinkles and acne scarring, alleviating dark pigmentation, and other conditions that the centers are investigating before making the laser widely available.
Doctors liken the laser system to aerating your lawn. âYou have a bunch of holes in your lawn, but you have normal lawn in between. This allows for more rapid healing because intact, normal skin bridges the gap between the laser-induced injured skin,â said Jeffrey Kenkel, M.D., vice chairman of plastic surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center, whose research involves the effects of lasers on tissue. âWe can vary the distance between the holes, which has an effect on how much tissue we choose to treat.â
This laser treatment is the new version of early CO2-based lasers popular in the early 1990s. But those lasers fell out of favor due to the long recovery times — sometimes months — and loss of skin pigmentation in the patientâs skin.
Researchers say this improved laser treatment can be performed on an out-patient basis, but may require some local or regional anesthetic. Recovery time is often between three and five days and costs between $500 and $3,000, depending on the magnitude of the procedure.
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SOURCE: UT Southwestern University