March 27, 2023 – New research shows that chemicals from automobile exhaust, wildfires and cigarette smoke impair our skin’s ability to provide healthy oil, increasing the likelihood of eczema.
The results give scientists clues as to how the skin disease might be treated higher. Today, there are greater than thrice as many cases of eczema as within the Seventies, and as much as 20% of kids and 10% of adults at the moment are affected.
“I think these authors are absolutely right in recognizing that the incidence of allergic diseases is increasing in parallel with the increase in various pollutants in our environment,” said Denver-based pediatric allergist and immunologist Jessica Hui, MD, in accordance with NBC News. “We finally understand better why people get eczema.”
Some people get eczema for genetic reasons, but the brand new research built on previous understanding of how certain chemicals can trigger eczema symptoms of intense itching, skin redness and weeping or painful rashes. An experiment in mice showed that exposure to isocyanates – chemicals commonly utilized in products corresponding to foam and automobile paint – disrupted the oil production that skin needs to remain healthy.
Researchers on the National Institutes of Health “found that bacteria living on healthy skin must adapt to survive when exposed to isocyanate,” the agency summarized in a Press release“When they adapt, these bacteria shift their metabolism away from producing the lipids or oils that the skin needs to stay healthy. This finding suggests that eczema may be treatable by replacing the altered skin bacteria with healthy bacteria.”
The study was published earlier this yr within the magazine Scientific advances.
The chemicals also trigger a message to the brain that causes skin inflammation and itching, lead researcher Dr. Ian Myles told NBC News. Myles can be director of the Epithelial Research Unit within the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and Microbiology on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“So much of this is beyond our control. I mean, you can't close the highways,” he said of the environmental sources.
Previous research into restoring healthy skin bacteria, called Roseomonas mucous membrane to treat eczema symptoms had mixed results. The NIH says it has made the bacteria available “for commercial, non-therapeutic development … as a potentially useful probiotic.”