Hyaluronic acid for Ageing skin

Ageing is a complex irreversible biological process. Youthful skin is pliable, resilient and maintains its elasticity because of its high water holding ability. Ageing makes skin thin, fragile, and wrinkled. Human skin aging is a complex process, resulting from intrinsic as well as extrinsic processes. Intrinsic ageing is innate, because of hormonal changes in the body and is unavoidable. Extrinsic aging is the result of exposure to environmental factors like UV light, dry weather and atmospheric pollutants etc. 

Daily exposure to external stress causes skin to lose moisture. The important substance having unique capacity to hold moisture in the skin is hyaluronic acid. The water holding ability of hyaluronic acid results in softer, smoother, and radiant skin.  It is the most prevalent glycosaminoglycan biopolymer with repeating units of D-glucuronic acid, also called as hyaluronan. It is found in many tissues like skin (predominantly in the dermis), eyes and joints and in various body fluids in mammals like vitreous humour of eyes, and synovial fluid of joints. 

As hyaluronic acid is endogenous substance so there is theoretically no need for skin testing for allergenicity. Safety, tolerability, and efficacy of hyaluronic acid facial filler injections is well reported. Various hyaluronic acid based formulations like creams, gels, lotions, serums, intra-dermal filler injections, dermal fillers, facial fillers, and autologous fat gels are effective to treat a wide range of skin defects such as wrinkles, nasolabial folds, and skin aging. Facial rejuvenations occurs via improvement in skin hydration level, increased skin tightness and elasticity, collagen stimulation and soft tissue augmentation.

Use of minimally invasive hyaluronic acid filler for aesthetic procedures is increased drastically. Patients’ desire for rapid results with minimal recovery without any surgery has transformed the facial plastic surgery, demanding that aesthetic surgeons become proficient in nonsurgical augmentation. Hyaluronic acid fillers are useful for the management of facial lines, lip augmentation, and acne scars. Patients’ acceptability appears to be good, although the successful placement of fillers in the high subdermal plane is totally dependent on the skill of the aesthetic surgeon.