Smokers age much faster

Study showed severe aging of facial skin through smoking

08/11/2013

Smoking is known to age the skin faster. US researchers have now investigated how strong the effect of nicotine is on the appearance of facial skin in a study of identical pairs of twins. The result is frightening: deep furrows and puffy bags adorn the faces of the smoking twins.

Effects of smoking in twins studied
In Twinsburg in the US state of Ohio since 1976, the „Twins Days Festval“ instead of. Over 2,000 twins take part in it every year. Plastic Surgeon Haruko Okada of Case Western Reserve University and his colleagues used the world's largest twin meeting to examine how nicotine consumption has changed smokers' facial skin. They chose identical twins to minimize genetic differences between the controls.

The requirement to participate in the study was that one twin had to be smoker and the other non-smoker, or smoked less than the other for at least five years. The study was based on photos taken between 2007 and 2010. Three reviewers then looked at the images and analyzed the wrinkles and other appearances in the participants' complexion caused by smoking.

Aging is particularly evident in the lower third of the smokers
The result of the analysis was clear: The skin of the smoking twins had aged much more strongly than the nonsmoker's. „The smoking twins had inferior levels of upper eyelid, skin redundancy, lower lid pockets, cheekbone pockets, nasolabial folds, upper lip wrinkles, lower lip wrinkles and lower jaw compared to their non-smoking siblings“, the surgeons report in the journal „Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery“. „For the twins with more than 5 years of difference in smoking duration, the twins who had smoked for longer had lower scores on the lower lid pockets, cheekbone pockets and lower lip wrinkles.“

The pictures showed that there are hardly any differences between smokers and nonsmokers in the upper third of the face. In the lower third of the face, on the other hand, smokers had much stronger wrinkles around their lips. The result of the investigation did not surprise the surgeons. As they report, smoking reduces the elasticity of the skin, so that, for example, the nasolabial fold between the nose and upper lip is more pronounced.

Although it has been known since the 1970s that smoking causes the skin to age faster, there was no detailed documentary evidence before that. It is also interesting in this context that the number of wrinkles depends on the number of cigarettes smoked. (Ag)

Image: seedo