After you’ve learned how to get rid of acne and manage to clear up your skin, the next step is to remove your acne scars, which are unsightly left-over reminders of your battle with acne. Laser treatment for acne scars can help a great deal with curing acne marks. A good acne blemish laser treatment can really do wonders for older acne scars and remove fresh acne scars.
Acne laser therapy can be expensive and require a few sessions so you may want to do a thorough research on the differences in types of laser treatments for removing acne scars before committing to one.
Types of laser for acne scar removal include Intense Pulsed Light (IPL), Pulsed dye laser (PDL) and carbon dioxide (CO2), Erbium Yag laser. So far, IPL is an option for reducing acne scarring but is not as powerful as other laser options. More professionals tend to use it because it there is less post-treatment aggravation of the skin.
The use of CO2 and or Erbrum Yag laser is called laser resurfacing. Layer of skin is removed concurrently to remove the scarred surface while heat from the laser smooths out the removed layer. CO2 and or Erbrum Yag lasers emit dense energy in extremely short pulses with heat to surrounding skin around a scar.
This treatment takes about 18 months before you can witness any results; skin and collagen will help rebuild layers of the skin completely. This form of treatment can be combined with other acne scar treatments, such as surgical treatment. This can be done before laser resurfacing will be completed 6-12 weeks prior to laser resurfacing and this combination will give you faster and better results.
Pulsed Dye Laser (PDL) directly targets blood vessels but not the surrounding skin, converting the light into heat. This treatment is safe and uses yellow laser and will not cause skin damage.
When choosing the type of laser treatment for acne scars, you will have to get your dermatologist to diagnose what kind of acne scars you have. Some of the common acne scars are hypertrophic, keloids and atrophic scars.
Hypertrophic scars are raised, firm scars formed as the result of over the top production of collagen in some areas in combination with a lack of collagen in others formed during the healing of a wound. Significant results can be seen with a few sessions of PDL treatments. Post-treatment of PDL will sometimes involve a slight sunburn-like sensation 15 to 30 minutes post-treatment.
Keloids are red-purple in colour, raised scars that can be identified by being more solid than hypertrophic scars. Keloids can be treated with PDL treatments although severe keloids may require the additional use of chemical injections of 5-fluorouracil or intralesional corticosteroid to see better results.
Atrophic scars are depressed surfaces of skin caused by collagen destruction during skin trauma like acne is also identifies as ice pick, or boxcar scars. Treatment for Atrophic scars are usually treated with punch excision or dermal filler augmentation but laser therapy by far the most effective.
Atrophic scars can treated safely with carbon dioxide (CO2) or Erbium-Yttrium-Aluminum-Garnet (Er:YAG) laser treatment with obvious improvements of the skin surface by 50-80%. The side-effects of Co2 or Erbium-Yttrium-Aluminum-Garnet (Er:YAG) treatments are generally mild but some crusting, scarring and blistering occur and in rare occasions, cause hyper-pigmentation, particularly in darker-skinned patients. However, these problems are usually resolved quickly and are impermanent.
The latest treatment for post-acne scarring and atrophic scarring is the uses of an nonablative radiofrequency device. This device uses radiofrequency in the form of electric currents to generate heat instead of light induced heat from a laser.
The Nonablative radiofrequency treatment is still a novel scar treatment therapy compared to laser treatments but in due time might prove to be an effective device for scar treatments. To sum up, there are a lot of laser treatments for acne scars out there so be sure to discuss all the laser treatment for acne scars options over with a professional dermatologist before settling for one laser treatment package.
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