A Study on the Alterations in Skin Viscoelasticity before and after an Intradermal Administration of Growth Factor

BACKGROUND: While photo-aging is believed to be preventable by the complete blockage of ultraviolet rays, there is no epoch-making method except sing fillers or autologous fat injection, for rejuvenating the skin once it has aged. OBJECTIVE: Our group developed a new method for rejuvenating aged skin by the direct intradermal injection of basic fibroblast growth factor, the first method of its kind in the world. In this paper we report the results of long-term follow-up observations and alterations in skin viscoelasticity before and after this treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A single dose of growth factor was injected directly into aged skin of the dorsal surface of the hand intradermally. The skin viscoelasticity of 50 treated cases was measured by a cutometer just before the treatment and at 1, 3, 6, and 9 months after treatment, respectively. RESULTS: We observed the following rejuvenating effects: improved skin softness, gradual improvement of turgor, improved thickness of atrophied skin, and greatly improved viscoelasticity which reveals the improvement of biomechanical properties of the treated aged skin. According to the comparisons of viscoelasticity between pre- and post-treatment, the rejuvenated changes of R2 and R7 values were comparable to an age difference of more than 20 years. CONCLUSION: This method was confirmed to have excellent effects in rejuvenating aged skin safely and reliably including biomechanical properties. With this advance, we expect conventional non-physiological skin rejuvenating treatments to be replaced by a much more fundamental method using one-time injections of the growth factor.