Loving my Science of Aging supplement in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal Jan 2021. This is an article about pollution’s affect on the skin. This may seem like a no-duh kind of thing (after surviving the smoke filled summer we had this past year in California, no one could argue that air pollution doesn’t affect your health), but as with all things, understanding it better will help us treat the outcomes better.
There are six common air pollutants recognized by the EPA. They look at particulate matter (PM), which are divided into categories based on size. Air pollution kills an estimated 7 million people worldwide every year. Nine out of ten people breathe air with a high level of pollutants. (Again, for those in the Bay Area, we normally have great air, but this summer we were all addicted to daily checks of the air quality index for months, and wore N-95 masks not for covid but for smoke. You can see how pollution kills).
The journal article, “Inflammasome Activation in Pollution Induced Skin Conditions” starts by talking about air pollutants, and how they hurt a variety of organs: heart, lung, GI, and brain. They were focused here on the affects on the skin.
- premature aging
- psoriasis
- acne
- atopic dermatitis
The skin is a primary barrier to pollution. If your skin is compromised- aging, genetic predispositions, repeated exposure- you may absorb more pollutants. Some of these pollutants trigger a cascade of other factors, some penetrate the skin.
All of these skin issues have inflammation as a common denominator. The activation of an inflammasome (a cytosolic multiprotein complex involved in the inflammatory response) promotes inflammatory cytokines- IL-Ib and IL-18. These IL are needed to fight bad things. But if they are produced in excess, they can lead to inflammatory and autoimmune issues.
Why do we care? If this is the mechanism of the skin issues, figuring out how to block the inflammasome will prevent the whole bad cascade from happening. The tricky part is you don’t want to block all of your immune response, and anything taken systemically could do that. So we know inflammasomes are bad. Inflammasomes are also thought to be associated with MS, Alzheimers, and cardiovascular disease. But some response is good.
There are some things out there which help block some of the inflammasome activation. You have heard of these: metformin, glyburide, dietary omega 3, superoxide dismutase, aloe vera, reservatrol, and curcumin. Some antioxidant topical treatments have shown beneficial effects.
We need to study these. As with all things, there is good and bad. We want to block the OVERproduction of inflammation, but we don’t want to block it completely because then you could be immune compromised. And do we take these systemically? do we put them on as a topical? What dose is good? Are some better for certain people?
What do I think?
Exciting stuff. Science is really helping us look at the body on a molecular level, trying to figure out how to improve our health. I think the folly of many is when reading blogs like this, they rush out and start taking tons of things to fight off those inflammasomes- they take tons of omega and reservatrol and metformin- without thinking about what dose is good, what are the other effects, etc.
We need to understand what the “right” amount of all this is. And it may be that if you live in downtown New York City (dense urban area) your need is different than if you live in outdoorsy bucolic Portola Valley, California.