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  • This Non-Invasive Light Treatment Can Remove Your Age Spots
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Welcome to the Buckingham Center Video Library. Today, we're going to talk about BroadBand Light, otherwise known as BBL. Now, everyone's heard about photofacial or IPL. BBL is very similar to those devices. However, it's from the Sciton Corporation that ends slightly different from the standpoint that it has two flash lamps and so therefore it has the ability to deliver greater amounts of energy to treat things such as even port-wine stains that perhaps other IPL machines don't. That's not to imply that there are not other IPL or photofacial machines out there or devices out there that can produce equivalents results. Our experiences with the BroadBand Light System and it provides a very nice treatment. What is BroadBand Light useful for? We tend to think of BBL as being useful for things that are already in existence, as well as things just to prevent the aging of skin. The first thing we use BBL for is for folks who have pigmentation in their skin, known as dyschromia or sun damage, so brown spots, liver spots and then people who have conditions that produce redness, such as rosacea, things such as called telangiectasia, which are fine red vessels in the skin.

The best thing the BBL is good at is reducing pigmentation spots or redness of the skin. That's the primary treatment. In those folks, we typically have them come in and they do a couple of treatments at least, and sometimes, up to three or four to improve those sort of things that they want to rid their skin of. Now, the other thing that BBL is useful for is maintaining the skin and attempting to prevent the aging of the skin. It does this through the same mechanism that it gets rid of brown and red and that is that the energy you apply to the skin is converted to heat, which causes denaturing of collagen and then the body up regulates the production of collagen. There's a dermatologist down in California who did a 10-year study where he basically enrolled patients, did two BBL treatments on them per year for 10 years. He had taken standardized before photos and then took standardized after photos. He then put all those photos into one pile, recruited some of his colleagues to look at those and assign an age to them.

They just went through the photos and said, "This person is 45. This person is 52. This person is 47." They brought the photos back up into the two piles and averaged those numbers and what they found was that even though the patients had aged 10 years, their skin had not. In fact, the after photos actually looked, on average, three months younger than the before photos. The clinical result of using BroadBand Light twice per year is that it produced collagen and essentially prevented the skin from aging. They then confirmed that on a molecular level by taking biopsies of some of the skin and proving that the collagen was thicker. The elastin fibers were in better shape and even that the DNA sequences that produce collagen were up regulated. Essentially, BBL is a very useful tool for reducing brown spots in the skin and that can be on the face, neck, chest, really even arms, although that gets into a big surface area and long lengths of time and so maybe more than what most people want to do.

Commonly people will do face, neck, and chest, and then hands are very common as well as those stick out from the clothing and so that tends to be an age part of the body that people like to have improved as well. BBL is really useful for treating pigmentation, very useful for treating redness, and also very useful as a maintenance to try and prevent collagen degradation, which then leads to the aging process in the skin and obviously looking older than maybe you want to. The process of delivering BBL is that you come into the office. Usually if you're doing a face, we'll apply a topical numbing ointment to your face and leave it in place for about 30 or 40 minutes as the face tends to be sensitive enough during the treatment that you benefit from having that numbing. However, neck and chest don't typically need that just as they're not so sensitive. A lot of people will do BBL without any numbing at all. For most patients, they prefer the comfort of having some lidocaine.

The procedure takes anywhere from about 30 minutes up to an hour depending on the surface area that you're doing. The great thing about BroadBand Light is that you essentially have no down time. You can put on sunscreen, makeup right after your treatment. While you might have a small degree of swelling, usually it's not enough to prevent you from social activities that day. Certainly, by the next day, you've lost the swelling enough, if you even have any, that you're ready to go and be social. It's a great treatment for, again, brown and red. It's a great treatment just as a maintenance to prevent collagen degradation, reduce the aging process as much as possible and the beauty of it is that you can have it done and essentially have no down time.

This Non-Invasive Light Treatment Can Remove Your Age Spots

Dr. Edward Buckingham explains Intense Pulsed Light and BroadBand Light (also referred to as Photorejuvenation), a skin rejuvenating treatment that uses light to treat sun damage, pigmentation problems, rosacea, and broken capillaries.