As I canoe through the Ardèche Gorge in southern France, I attract some peculiar glances. It is a sunny afternoon in July and the sky is a perfect cobalt blue.
The power of the radiant sun is more visible to me than ever. Its rays have turned the surface of the water into a mirror of light so bright that it blinds you just looking at it. I don’t want to take risks: I chose my clothes with the same seriousness as an explorer who ventures into the Sahara.
My arms, hands, and torso are completely covered in a long-sleeved sun-protective T-shirt, while my head is covered by a bucket hat with a cloth to protect my face.
The finishing touches consist of several layers of high factor sunscreen—which makes the part of my skin that is exposed the shimmering pale shade of titanium white—and a pair of sunglasses.
My vanity has no limits and I am determined to avoid further aging caused by the sun. But could there be other hidden benefits to these extreme measures?
In fact, could my obsession with keeping my skin healthy be an accidental stroke of genius?
The answer to both questions is yes. Recent research indicates that our skin is not just a reflection of our lifestyle, showing the effect of years of smoking, drinking, sunbathing and living under stress.
It turns out that the largest organ in our body is an active participant in our physical well-being.
This is a strange new reality where wrinkles, dry skin and blemishes cause aging, not the other way around.
a strange revelation
In 1958, the same year that the United States passed the law that led to the moon landing and the creation of NASA, another great project was quietly conceived.
The Baltimore Longitudinal Study was to be a scientific investigation of aging with a bold and unorthodox premise.
Before, it was standard scientific practice to obtain information about the physiology of living people from donated corpses. But this time, the subjects would be scrutinized earlier, while their hearts were still beating.
The study followed thousands of adult men (and later women) for decades to see how their health evolved, and how it was affected by their genes and environment.
Just two decades later, scientists had already made some intriguing discoveries, from the discovery that less emotionally stable men were more likely to be diagnosed with coronary heart disease, to the revelation that our problem-solving abilities are only slightly reduced with age.
But one of the most surprising findings confirmed what has long been suspected: How young you look is a remarkably accurate gauge of your inner health.
By 1982, men who appeared older for their age at the start of the study were more likely to be dead 20 years later.
This is supported by more recent research, which found that of patients who looked at least 10 years older than they should, 99% had health problems.
It turns out that skin health can be used to predict a number of seemingly unrelated factors, from bone density to the risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases to the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
However, as the evidence was added, the story took an unexpected turn. Is the skin just a living tally of the damage we’ve racked up, or is it something more complicated?
Could it, in fact, keep healthy people healthy and worsen the condition of the sick?
another kind of birthday
There are two main ways to measure a person’s age. The first is the standard one, known as the chronological age (the one that follows the revolutions of the sun).
But there is also biological age, which indicates the rate at which you physically age (the maturity of your organs and cells).
Both can vary greatly from each other between different people and even within the same body.
As we accumulate years, it is known that our chronological age will eventually catch up with our appearance: the skin becomes thinner and less toned, it loses elasticity, when the cells responsible for producing pigment and collagen die or become ” sixties”, which means that they stop renewing themselves and continue to exist in a latent state.
But it is the environment that tends to do the most damage. Although ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation can damage DNA – causing burns, mutations and skin cancer – 95% of the total ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface is ultraviolet A (UVA).
This portion of the sun’s rays has a longer wavelength, which allows it to penetrate deep into the dermis, where it breaks down collagen and stimulates cells to produce melanin.
On a microscopic level, photoaged skin—skin that has aged from the sun—is thicker, with tangles of misshapen elastin and collagen fibers.
At a visible level, it is generally irregularly pigmented and has many more wrinkles.
This is true whether you have very light skin, which is incapable of tanning, or if you have very dark skin. Even highly pigmented skin can burn and is susceptible to photoaging, although wrinkles will take longer to appear.
In fact, intrinsic factors are believed to be responsible for the smallest fraction of the classic “aged” appearance, while ultraviolet light is responsible for over 80% of visible skin changes.
If you spend all day indoors with the curtains drawn, you may not see significant changes in this organ until you hit your 80s.
However, most importantly, along with all these effects, the skin undergoes a chemical transformation. And it is this that can have a profound impact on our overall health.
chemical cocktail
In the year 2000 a radical new concept emerged. By looking at the way most organisms respond to stress, a group of scientists at the University of Bologna, Italy, suggested a new way of thinking about aging.
In a healthy young person, the immune system routinely kicks in to maintain order: repairing damage and fending off infection.
But as we age, or as our health worsens, these inflammatory responses can cross a critical threshold—a point beyond which they accelerate, unleashing a cascade of powerful chemicals throughout the body, destroying healthy cells and crippling our DNA. .
It is the so-called “aging-inflammation”, a low-grade background inflammation that accompanies the aging process.
This is when the skin becomes important. The latest research indicates that wrinkled, diseased, or damaged skin becomes part of this inflammation system, releasing a chemical cocktail that leads to further damage and inflammation.
“Chronologically aged skin shows higher expression levels of a whole panel of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines,” explains Mao-Qiang Man, a researcher at the University of California San Francisco, in the US, who says that also applies to photoaged skin.
Locally, these chemicals break down collagen and elastin, further thinning the skin, creating wrinkles, and reducing elasticity, explains Tuba Musarrat Ansary, a postdoctoral researcher at Jichi Medical University in Japan.
This is further compounded by senescent cells in the skin – a product of natural aging or UV damage – which also release their own inflammatory chemicals.
But this is just the beginning. As the largest organ in the body, the skin can have a profound impact. Chemicals released by diseased and dysfunctional skin enter the bloodstream, where they spread and damage other tissues.
Amid the resulting systemic inflammation, chemicals from the skin can reach and damage seemingly unrelated organs, including the heart and brain.
The result is accelerated aging and an increased risk of developing most—or possibly all—of the related disorders.
Until now, aging or diseased skin has been linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive decline, as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Although we are all familiar with the risks of smoking, drinking, overeating and lack of exercise, it could be argued that poor skin health is the factor that we all tend to overlook.
The good news is that there is a lot we can do to improve.
question of hydration
The first step to protect the skin – and therefore, according to this new theory, our health in general – is to stay out of the sun.
The most famous protection method is the Australian protocol first launched in 1981 and later expanded to five points consisting of: put on a T-shirt, high factor sunscreen, wear a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and find a spot in the shadow.
Plus, if the link between skin damage and age-related diseases isn’t compelling enough to encourage people to protect themselves, there are two other good reasons to do so.
The first is that protecting your skin from the sun is extremely effective in preventing the visible signs of aging.
The second is that there is compelling evidence that sunscreen can prevent most of the inflammation that occurs when skin is exposed to the sun, the first step towards the development of age-related diseases.
But this is not the only way to keep your skin in good condition. In fact, the easiest way to improve the health of this organ is to moisturize. And there is direct evidence that this reduces inflammation, and that it can help prevent dementia.
In addition to uneven skin tone and wrinkles, both age- and sun-aged skin is significantly drier. Skin’s moisture levels peak at age 40 and then plummet, producing ever-decreasing amounts of its natural humectants (lipids, filaggrin, sebum, and glycerol).
This is a problem, because dehydrated skin is a less effective barrier between the inside of our body and the outside world.
When our skin is dry and flaky, its usual tasks – keeping out infectious agents, environmental toxins and allergens, while keeping it moisturized – become more difficult.
However, restoring its moisture is not particularly complicated, beyond what cosmetic advertisements say. And in the field of aging, this s A simple intervention shows remarkable results.
In one study, an international team of researchers asked elderly volunteers to apply a topical moisturizer twice a day for one month.
Compared to other older participants who did not receive any treatment, the skin of the participants who moisturized was significantly restored, showing lower levels of three different classes of inflammatory chemicals.
These promising results were quickly followed up by another study by the same team, involving adults over the age of 65, using moisturizer twice a day for three years.
The cognitive function of the participants was measured at the beginning and at the end of the study. The control group that did not moisturize their skin showed a significant decline in their cognitive function. In those who had hydrated the skin, it had not deteriorated.
“Declining hydration levels of the stratum corneum (the outer layer of the epidermis) is probably the biggest contributing factor to ‘inflammation-aging,’” Man says.
And he adds that because dry skin tends to have higher levels of inflammation it can be itchy. If you can’t resist the urge to scratch, the inflammation worsens.
However, Man points out, many natural ingredients can help. These include glycerol, petroleum jelly, hyaluronic acid, and lipids, which are normally found in this layer of skin and are typical ingredients in even the most basic moisturizers.
It’s also possible that simply drinking more water could help keep skin more hydrated, although the evidence is more mixed.
To visualize the extent to which skin can affect the rest of your body, it helps to think about how much skin you have, and remember that all the skin you see on the outside of your body is, unsurprisingly, replicated on the inside as well. And when your skin is damaged, every inch of it can release toxic chemicals.
So protecting it pays off, but don’t forget to moisturize it too.
*This article was published on BBC Future. Click here to see the original version.
Keep reading:
* The main skin problems suffered by African Americans
* 4 steps to take care of the skin of the face with the minimum effort at any age
* What kind of acids help facial skin and what are they for?
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