Blog Reprise: Fighting Aging with Facial Fillers (Part II)

Here is part two of a blog entry of mine in 2013 …

As I previously wrote, Botox is muscle relaxing toxin, which in micro therapeutic doses provides necessary facial expression easing, which in turn disseminates appearance of deep skin wrinkles formed under the pulling force of face emotion muscles: frown lines, forehead wrinkles and those around eyes.

I would say that is lot of help to start, but in many instances would represent only an initial step because sometimes the damage to the skin (and underlying collagen) can be extent beyond the point whereas just muscle relaxation alone can undo it.

Enter dermal fillers, whose primary goal is to compensate for volumetric (atrophic) changes that took place within one’s skin.

With dermal filler, we can choose from a variety of products, but it will also depend on the objective a patient and her / his doctor would aim to achieve. Generally speaking there are resorbable (later absorbed by one’s body) and non-resorbable fillers. Both types provide an immediate result, but the former ones are more forgiving since the change they produce is slowly diminishing over a period of time, whereas the latter ones are permanent.

Resorbable fillers gained great deal of popularity due to variety of factors and mostly represented by Hyaluronic acid gels (Restalyne, Juviderm). Hyaluronic acid is natural part of connective tissue and therefore has relatively minimal risk of usage and ease of application. The results generally last 4-7 months and have somewhat lingering deep hydration effect. The group of permanent fillers includes products based on Hydroxyl apatite and patient’s own fat tissue transfers. They provide rather long lasting corrections and changes and therefore considered more carefully and on the less frequent basis compared to use of Hyaluronic Acid gels.

There is yet another group of facial injectable aids that is capable of providing a whole different benefit of stimulating natural collagen growth and tissue self repair. Though results of their application appear some time later those by far are my favorite ones since we are literally turning the clock back while achieving a bit subtler, but far more naturally appearing changes with pronounced anti-aging effect. They include Polylactic Acid (Sculptra) and patient’s own activated Growth Factors. Upon injection under special careful technique Polylactic Acid is being slowly absorbed by patient’s local tissue, while significantly stimulating growth of endogenous skin collagen. The areas of administration are sunken cheeks and temples as well as deep nose-lips (nasolabial) lines.

Whereas Polylactic acid is completely synthetic, the Growth Factors mentioned above are obtained from a patient’s own blood that is processed via special technology. Once obtained those Growth factors are activated and injected into an area of correction using once again a special technique. Areas of application can be multiple including lower eyelids, chin, lips and even upper neck to correct saggy and aged looking skin with or without age spots. There are also some non-injective methods such physical therapy using various light frequencies and ultrasound stimulation, but I guess we have already covered a lot.