Vitiligo - Melanin

What is Vitiligo?

Vitiligo is a condition in which your skin loses melanin, the pigment that determines the color of your skin, hair and eyes. If the cells that produce melanin die or no longer form melanin, slowly growing white patches of irregular shapes appear on your skin.

Vitiligo usually starts as small areas of pigment loss that spread and become larger with time. These changes in your skin can result in stress and worries about your appearance. There is no cure for vitiligo. The goal of treatment is to stop or slow the progression of depigmentation and, if you desire, attempt to return some color to your skin.

It’s a condition where the skin looses its color and becomes pale. It is caused by the removal of melanin from the skin which is the pigment that determines the color of the skin. The vitiligo starts as small white patches of pigment loss which then spreads to other parts of the body. There is no wonder drug for vitiligo however there are several therapies which might help in decreasing the spread of the depigmentation but most of them take from six to eighteen months in order to show some satisfactory results.

What are the causes of vitiligo?
Human skin contains melanin, a dark pigment produced from the amino acid tyrosine by pigment cells known as melanocytes. Melanin is the pigment that determines the physical appearances like color of skin, hair, and eyes. It is produced in cells called melanocytes. If melanocytes cannot form melanin or if their number decreases, skin color will progressively fade resulting in a paler whitish look. If skin

Affected by vitiligo is examined under the microscope, the melanocytes are absent and there are signs of inflammation in the deeper layer of the skin.

Treatment of vitiligo
Treatment choices of vitiligo depend on the conditions and amount of area infected and how widespread they are. Also each and every person responds differently to treatment .a particular therapy might work for you but for another person it might not. So treatment normally runs as a trial and an error process until the one that works for that particular person is found out.

1. Tropical cortico steroid therapy
2. Topical psoralenplus ultraviolet
3. Narrow band ultraviolet b
4. Oral psoralen photo chemotherapy
5. Skin grafting