Treatment options improve for ethnic skin problems
DETROIT – LaShan Felix has seen 20 doctors in her lifetime for the dry scaly patches of skin she gets on her hands and feet.
Chronic dermatitis, a type of eczema, also changes the color of the front of her hands from black to white.
Felix had no luck clearing up the problem until recently, when she started seeing Dr. Diane Jackson-Richards, director of the Multicultural Dermatology Clinic at Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit. The clinic opened last spring.
The clinic reflects a new niche: treating skin and hair problems in people of color.
The awareness of these issues is necessary and just beginning, says Dr. Lorna Thomas, a Detroit dermatologist who lectures nationally.
“The light bulb has come on,” she says.
U.S. Census Bureau projections estimate that 28 percent of the U.S. population will be people of color by 2050, up from 19 percent in 2000.
Thomas and other ethnic skin specialists have booming practices.
Often minorities themselves, the skin specialists say they bring greater appreciation and, often, deeper knowledge to ethnic skin issues. And they are helping enroll more minorities in clinical studies, to see whether new products and technologies work as well on dark skin as on lighter complexions.
Up to now, many drugs in the field have been tested only on white people.
At the same time, the skin product market is catching on to the phenomena.
Type “ethnic skin” on any Internet search engine and pages of offerings pop up, from doctor and product Web sites to a pamphlet on black skin developed by the American Academy of Dermatology, www.aad.org/pamphlets/black.
Sonya Dakar, a California skin-care specialist to dozens of actresses and performers, features sections on her Web site, www.sonyadakar.com, on Latino, black and Asian skin. Though she’s better known as the skin specialist of fair-skinned actresses and performers like Britney Spears and Gwyneth Paltrow, her site also features testimonials from singer India.Arie and television actress Tangi Miller.
There’s also a new book by Dr. Fran Cook-Bolden, director of the Ethnic Skin Speciality Group at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. “Beautiful Skin of Color, A Comprehensive Guide to Asian, Olive and Dark Skin” (HarperCollins; $25.95), walks people through a host of problems.
Experts advise:
• Shop around if you are buying products over the counter. Prices vary widely.
• Insurance often doesn’t cover the treatments.
• Proceed cautiously with any treatment. Some worsen problems they claim to treat.
• Test an unseen area of skin first.
• Don’t pick aggressive therapies first.
• Get in as soon as you notice a problem.
“If you wait too long, there may be little a doctor can do,” Thomas says. Recently, she surgically removed a small keloid on the ear of Sharmene Cooper, 15, a junior at Henry Ford High School, Detroit. It grew to the size of a pea over two years after she had her ear pierced.
Thomas numbed Cooper’s ear and surgically removed the keloid with a small scalpel and told her to return in 10 days. She will have to undergo steroid injections in the site for a year to avoid a recurrence. Thomas advises that all ear piercing be done by age 2, when keloids usually don’t occur.
Worth the effort
Felix saw improvements in her skin condition that pleased her after just a month, with a triple-drug preparation TriLuma, a prescription cream for hyperpigmentation.
“The way this looks, it’s a blessing,” she says.
“No one wanted to touch my hands,” says Felix, 34, who works at Motor City Casino in Detroit. She wears gloves to cover her hands while working in food service. “To be honest, it’s depressing.”
Kailesh Dave, a Ford Motor Co. engineer from India, sees Jackson-Richards for eczema, which caused one side of his face to darken and itch. Jackson-Richards prescribed lotions and a bleaching cream to reduce the itching. A month earlier, she had him try TriLuma to lighten the darker spot on his face.
It worked. The spot looks more like a 5 o’clock shadow. She wants him to continue the treatment to get better results.
“If this is it, I’m satisfied,” he says. “You’ve got to move on with your life. It’s not make it or break it.”
Where color comes from
Skin color is produced in cells called melanocytes. They are one of the body’s many factories, with numerous assembly lines of cells and tasks to accomplish.
One job is to convert an amino acid called tyrosine into melanin, the pigment that determines the color of skin, eyes and hair.
In people of color, melanocytes are larger or more abundant, in each layer of the skin, compared to whites, where fewer cells are concentrated only in lower layers.
Hormones, heredity, injury and radiation also affect pigmentation.
Scratching or other diseases can worsen skin color changes. So can sun exposure.
Use sunscreens faithfully and stay out of the sun if possible.