What are keloids? How bad are they?
Keloids are benign tumors of the skin caused by faulty healing. They are not dangerous (cancerous) but they can still make life miserable for the person who suffers from this healing disorder.
A keloid originates in local trauma and it’s a growth that extends beyond the scar’s boundary.
There are at least two distinct keloid types: the superficial-spreading/flat keloids and the bulging/raised keloids. This is one of the many skin problems that are treated without a good understanding of what causes them, an approach that leads to bad results.
What we do know is that wound healing is a complex process and that many things can go wrong with the process. What causes a keloid? We don’t know, but there are some factors that make keloids more frequent. Darker skin increases the probability of keloids, although we don’t know why this is the case. Other factors are the location in the body and tension at the site. The injury can be the result of surgery or trauma, and inflammation will increase the chances of a a scar ending up as a keloid.
The lack of understanding of keloids translates in the enormous variety of methods used to try to decrease them. Compression bandages and silicon sheets, injections of corticosteroid, or with substances such as 5-fluorouracil, interferons, bleomycin, verapamil, penicillamine and colchicines. Other methods involve partial resection techniques, such as cryotherapy, or resection by carbon dioxide laser or Nd:Yag-laser. Radiation therapy. The relapse frequency after treatments is huge, with the almost certainty that if surgery is attempted, another keloid will be formed.
When (experimental) medicine has such a low success rate, more people try to find alternatives. Is there anything that can be done?
Yes. Try to reduce inflammation, make sure we have enough essential fatty acids like alpha-linolenic acid, eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid. Rosehip seed oil seems to help tissue regeneration in surgical wounds and in treatment of keloids. Phytosterols can help with skin damage produced by radiotherapy, and with scars and keloids. Quercetin helps with allergy and inflammation; and this is why you will find it in our anti-inflammatory cream which helps with eczema without inducing skin atrophy
Green tea and its extracts have been shown to reduce the proliferation of keloid fibroblast, their migration and collagen synthesis. From Skin Active products, the following may be helpful: Nourishing skin serum, Ultra calming cream, Sensitive skin cream, and products containing EGCG. I will update this post as I find out more about this skin problem.
References
Gieringer. (2009). Keloids: Fundamental principles and prospects (Review). Molecular Medicine Reports, 3(1). doi:10.3892/mmr_00000212
Limandjaja, G. C., Niessen, F. B., Scheper, R. J., & Gibbs, S. (2020). The Keloid Disorder: Heterogeneity, Histopathology, Mechanisms and Models. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 8. doi:10.3389/fcell.2020.00360
Michael, A. I., Ademola, S. A., Olawoye, O. A., Iyun, A. O., Adebayo, W., & Oluwatosin, O. M. (2017). Pediatric keloids: A 6-year retrospective review. Pediatric Dermatology, 34(6), 673–676. doi:10.1111/pde.13302
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