Latest news with #DaniloDelCampo
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Why do our fingers wrinkle in water? It's much deeper than skin.
'Why have my fingers gone all pruney?' It's a question that has puzzled children at bath time, teens at swimming lessons, and adults after long hot tub sessions. Scientists once thought that these wrinkles were due to fingers swelling up like a sponge after being soaked with water. However, this theory washes off quickly. Our digits would have to increase drastically in size to produce such wrinkles. Instead, the answer has more to do with our nerves than skin. The skin on the palms of our hands and soles of our feet is unique, says Danilo Del Campo, a dermatologist at the Chicago Skin Clinic. It's called glabrous skin, a name from the Latin word glaber, meaning 'bald.' This hairless surface plays an essential role in sensing our environment. It is packed with receptors that transmit signals from our skin into electrical impulses that our brain can read. Glabrous skin is not unique to humans. It makes up the unusual protuberances that the star-nosed mole uses to sense its environment and the upper bill of the platypus. An analysis of glabrous skin in rats found that the ratio of fast-conducting to slow-conducting nerves was three times higher in glabrous skin than in hairy skin. Clinicians first realized that the uniquely sensor-packed structure of glabrous skin might have something to do with wrinkly skin in a study nearly a century ago, says Lauren Taglia, a dermatologist at Northwestern Medicine. In a 1936 paper, Sir George White Pickering and Thomas Lewis reported case studies of people with polio-induced nerve damage who had remarkably wrinkle-proof digits. Regardless of how long they spent in water, their fingers remained smooth as marble. These patients had sustained damage to their median nerve, which runs down the arm and provides motor and sensory links to the hand and forearm. This nerve is an important connection in the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system gets our body ready for physical action. In the heart, it increases pump rate and contraction force. In the eye, the same system dilates the pupil, allowing more light to enter. These functions are often referred to as our 'fight-or-flight' responses. Research in the 1970s identified that it was damage to these sympathetic connections in the median nerve that stopped wrinkling. Dipping a hand in warm water was recognized as a valuable test for this type of nerve damage. View this post on Instagram A post shared by photoowlsocial (@photoowlsocial) It wasn't until 2003 that a study identified how the sympathetic nervous system made fingers wrinkle. Here, researchers looked at how blood flow to the hands changed after water immersion. Finger wrinkling was accompanied by a sudden drop in blood flow. This decrease was caused by the sympathetic nervous system narrowing the diameter of the blood vessels in the hand, a process called vasoconstriction. These studies finally mapped out how finger wrinkling works. There was just one remaining question: why does it happen in the first place? Scientists settled this question in a 2021 study. Nick Davis, a researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University, organized an experiment at the British Science Museum. Davis assessed museum visitors' ability to grip wet and dry objects. Then, he asked them to immerse their hands in warm water. Once their fingers had wrinkled, he tested their grip again. Anyone who has fought to grab a bottle of shampoo during a shower will know that picking up wet objects requires more force than dry objects. Davis's analysis showed wrinkled fingers gripped wet objects more easily than wet but unwrinkled fingers. 'Evolutionarily speaking,' says Taglia, 'perhaps there's an advantage for our ancestors that they could grab fish from bodies of water.' Our shoeless forefathers would also have benefited from being able to ford streams or rivers without slipping through their wrinkly feet, she says. It's a fortunate coincidence that a feature carved by evolution millennia ago now benefits diagnostic medicine today. 'I like to say that the skin is the window to your entire body,' concludes Del Campo. This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
USA Today
29-01-2025
- Health
- USA Today
TikTokers blame acne on toxic relationships. They might actually be right.
Can you really tell if someone's in a toxic relationship just by the state of their skin? Some TikTokers seem to think so. On the social media app, users are posting pictures of their skin from when they were in toxic relationships alongside pictures of their skin since becoming single or getting into healthy relationships. In the before photos, they often have severe acne; in the after ones, their skin appears clear and glowing. TikTok's verdict? The skin doesn't lie: If you're in a bad or toxic relationship, your complexion is going to show it. And what better way to clear up acne than to rid yourself of that relationship and embark on a new journey... right? Not so fast. Dermatologists say there is certainly merit to the idea that toxic relationships take a toll on your skin, as well as your overall health, and thereby contribute to acne. But does that mean you should dump your significant other just because your breakouts aren't clearing up? Or that having acne means your relationship must be toxic? Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. "A lot of these observations are actually later shown to be built on actual science," Dr. Danilo Del Campo, the founder and medical director of Chicago Skin Clinic, says. Is it true that the skin doesn't lie? On TikTok, there seems to be a guiding ethos when it comes to physical health and dating: that your body will reject someone if they're the wrong person for you, even if you haven't consciously realized it. On the flipside, some add that your body will affirm when someone is right for you. For instance, one user showed her acne-ridden skin from when she was in a toxic relationship and her clear skin now that she's in a healthy one. In a video with 6.3 million views, another TikToker writes that "your body will automatically reject someone who's not right for you," showing her own before and after as an example. The videos have struck a chord with commenters, who share similar experiences. "my acne AND scars started to clear up once I let go of him," one person wrote. "all of a sudden my skin cleared up too when I became single," wrote another. On the other hand, one person wrote, "Broke up with him about a month ago and my skin has never been worse." Dermatologists say there's a lot of truth to this, though it isn't the full story. While having acne may not tell you if a specific relationship in your life is toxic, it could certainly tell you that you are under stress. Dr. Anthony Rossi, a dermatologist and surgeon who hosts the podcast "Give Good Face: Clean Clinical Science," says stress can be a major contributor to acne by affecting the amount of cortisol in our bodies, which impacts our oil glands. "When we are stressed out emotionally or mentally, your cortisol levels can increase, and your heart rate can increase. You can sweat more," he says. "In doing so, that can actually make things like eczema flare. It can make things like psoriasis get worse and even acne." Gen Z is overdoing Botox,and it's making them look old. When is the right time to get it? Additionally, other lifestyle factors, like diet and sleep, impact your skin too. So, if you're not sleeping well because you're up late fretting over your relationship, that's also going to contribute to your acne. And, if the stress from your relationship is also making you turn to junk food for comfort, that will too. Chocolate and milk in particular, Rossi says, have been shown to contribute to acne, as well as other high glycemic, high sugar foods. Del Campo says all these factors can compound on each other too, creating a nightmare for your skin. "One thing can build onto another," he says. "So yes, I do believe that it could be a sign of someone who's just not in a good place in their lives." People are paying for facial analysis:Has our obsession with beauty gone too far? This isn't just limited to relationships. Stress in general, no matter where it comes from, can contribute to acne. So, if you think your mental health is hurting your skin health, it's important to reflect on if it's really your relationship that's the problem or something else. "It is not always relationship stress," dermatologist Dr. Brooke Jeffy says. "It could be stress because they're working a job that's negatively influencing their sleep or they're a student and they're staying up late and that's affecting their sleep or their nutrition is off or they're staying up late playing video games." The real lesson of the TikTok trend Though dermatologists caution against chalking up all your skin woes to your relationship, they do say these TikToks hold an important lesson, which is that mental health plays a tremendous role in physical health. Because of this, the best skincare regimens don't just involve cleansers and sunscreens, but also mindfulness practices and occasional check-ins on how one is doing mentally. It's also important to understand that family history plays a role in how acne-prone one is and to keep in mind that acne often comes in waves no matter what's going on in your life. "I don't necessarily think just ending that relationship is going to clear up your skin entirely," Rossi says. "Acne is an interesting disease, because it's cyclical in the way it flares." More:Sephora kids are mobbing retinol, anti-aging products. Dermatologists say it's a problem That being said, if you're having abnormal acne and you know your relationship is causing you stress, it might be worth paying attention. "If something in your life is causing you emotional and physical stress, it's not good. Not just for your skin, but also your mental wellbeing," Rossi says. As a result, he says, people's personal lives often come up in his practice. "The skin is a big reflection of how people feel."
