Cigarette Smoking and Skin Damage

Cigarette smoking in movies and in real life has different significations. For example in classic movies, cigarette smoking was used as shorthand to convey closeness and beauty. But in the real life, the connection between smoking and one's appearance has more to do with premature signs of aging and less to do with glamour and perfection.

After a lot of studies, researchers found that smoking may be associated with a higher degree of aging on areas of skin, such as that of the inside of the upper arm, that are not normally exposed to sunlight. Yolanda R. Helfrich, the lead author and assistant professor of dermatology at the U-M Medical School, said: "We examined non-facial skin that was protected from the sun, and found that the total number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day and the total years a person has smoked were linked with the amount of skin damage a person experienced."

The researchers developed a photo numeric scale that can be easily reproduced by other medical institutions to measure the degree of aging on patients' skin. The nine-point scale used information from photographs of the inside-upper-arm skin of the 77 participants. Two medical residents and a medical student were asked to look at the photographs and assign a grade in which zero represented no fine wrinkling and eight represented severe fine wrinkling. The same three people reviewed photos of the participants one year later, and the scores were used to determine the level of increase in the skin damage.

Researchers also collected data about the participants, such as their age, ethnicity, history of cigarette smoking, use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, use of dietary or herbal supplements, sun exposure, sunscreen use, tanning bed use and, and women were asked how many children they had given birth to, hormone therapy use and oral contraceptive use. After the full investigation, researchers found that among participants who were 45 years or older, the degree of skin aging was found to be significantly higher in smokers than non-smokers.

The number of cigarette smokers is dropping world-wide, there are still one million new smokers lighting up each year in the US alone – many of them young women who may later come to regret the irreversible effects on their looks.