Healing Scars
’s a popular belief that rubbing vitamin E oil onto your acne scars can help them heal, and reduce their visibility. However, evidence that vitamin E has this effect is mostly anecdotal. And one-third of the participants who used vitamin E developed a red, itchy rash called contact dermatitis.
Researchers concluded that using a topical form of vitamin E before and after surgery improved the way wounds healed. Research on how vitamin E can treat acne and heal its scars is inconclusive. Supplements for healing Some research suggests that vitamin E supplements can be effective for people with severe damage to their skin.
Vitamin E can support your body in several aspects of the healing process. For example, vitamin E protects the body’s tissues from free radicals, which can damage cells and accelerate aging. Both functions are vital to healin.
What Is Vitamin E?
Y help moisturize the skin, research indicates that vitamin E oils and supplements have no notable effect on scars. This article looks at whether vitamin E might help reduce the appearance of scars and other beneficial techniques.
What The Research Says
For example, one 2015 study suggested that vitamin E may improve symptoms and quality of life for people with atopic dermatitis, or eczema.
A 2016 review says that more research is required to investigate whether there is any value in using vitamin E to manage scar healing. At present, there is not enough evidence to recommend using vitamin E to diminish scars. Using vitamin E for scars Based on the available evidence, it would seem that vitamin E does not reduce the appearance of scarring.
However, moisturizing the skin can help prevent scars from forming during wound healing, according to the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD). As long as a person is not allergic to vitamin E, they can use a moisturizer that contains this ingredient. Anyone interested in using topical vitamin E oil or taking vitamin E supplements should speak to a healthcare provider before trying.
Learn more about vitamin E oil here. While most scars fade over time, many are permanent. How long it takes for a scar to fade can depend on the initial injury’s size and depth.
The researchers found that it took 7 months , on average, for the redness to fade.
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C term for a group of tocol and tocotrienol derivatives. Anecdotal reports claim that vitamin E speeds wound healing and improves the cosmetic outcome of burns and other wounds.
Many lay people use vitamin E on a regular basis to improve the outcome of scars and several physicians recommend topical vitamin E after skin surgery or resurfacing. A was Aquaphor, a regular emollient, and the B was Aquaphor mixed with vitamin E. The scars were randomly divided into parts A and B. The study was double blinded.
The physicians and the patients independently evaluated the scars for cosmetic appearance on Weeks 1, 4, and 12. The criteria was simply to recognize which side of the scar looked better if there was any difference. A third blinded investigator was shown photographs of the outcomes and their opinion was also noted.
In 90% of the cases in this study, topical vitamin E either had no effect on, or actually worsened, the cosmetic appearance of scars. Of the patients studied, 33% developed a contact dermatitis to the vitamin E. Therefore we conclude that use of topical vitamin E on surgical wounds should be discourage.