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....This is probably telling you more than you want to know, but I never had a single zit to trouble my teenage years (I had plenty of other teenage problems, of course, not the least of which was a hyperactive nature that still gets me in lots of trouble; you think I’m like this just because I drink lots of coffee?). So for me, an acne outbreak was just a huge joke that God played on some of my friends, like my friend, Allan, who inevitably broke out in Hummer-sized zits in conjunction with a big date (a big date for Allan was any date at all) or some other event in which hundreds of people would be witnesses to his embarrassment.
....To people like Allan, however, acne is not at all a laughing matter. In fact, even mild acne can cause significant psychological problems, so one must never nonchalantly dismiss anyone’s laments about their – to you - seemingly trivial zits. And this doesn’t just apply to young people, either, because up to 25 percent of adults are also affected by forms of acne.
....To understand acne, you first have to have an anatomy lesson, but don’t get your hopes up – there are no
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that are trapped in the follicle produce an inflammatory reaction to alerts the body that something is happening in that follicle, and the body rushes in its usual anti-inflammatory arsenal (white blood cells, enzymes, proteins). (And I’ll bet you thought it was going to be easy to describe a zit, eh?).
....When the walls of a plugged follicle break down from the ongoing inflammation, the yukky contents spill onto the skin producing a pimple. If the swelling extends deeper into the skin, it can produce acne nodules and cysts, which are just deep balls of pus, and which invariably go on to scar.
....So acne can vary from minor - a non-inflamed plugged follicle (whiteheads) - to very severe – a face or back pitted with ragingly inflamed cysts.
....Why does acne happen? The best-known factor linked to the development of acne is male hormones (androgens), especially, the notorious testosterone. Both boys and girls are subject to an androgen gusher at puberty (boys, obviously, spume way more testosterone than girls), leading to a spike in sebum production and hence a higher risk of acne. |
dirty bits in this anatomy lesson.
....The skin, especially on the face, neck, and upper back, is very well supplied with what doctors, who love complex names for simple concepts, call pilo-sebaceous units (PSUs), which consist of a gland that produces sebum or oil, a hair follicle (the pit from which a hair grows), and the actual hair that grows from that follicle.
....The other essential thing to understand about the skin is that it’s covered with gazillions of bacteria.
....Now, most of the time, everything is hunky-dory: the sebaceous gland pours oil into the follicle, the oil oozes to the surface of the skin, and the bacteria just lie about doing what they’re supposed to do: helping fight off infection from more pathogenic organisms.
....This is, to borrow a phrase from music, is the easy listening “The Hair Follicle – Unplugged”.
...But then there’s that horror album, “The Follicle – Plugged”. So when for some reason (hormones, the introduction of some drugs, using some cosmetics), a fol.licle plugs up, the sebum has nowhere to go, and the gland and the follicle swell. Bacteria |
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