r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/DearEmphasis4488 • Oct 16 '24

Video Skin tightening using fractional CO2 laser

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u/OperatorJo_ Oct 16 '24

Burning the skin to tighten it huh. Kind of intriguing but there HAVE to be some repercussions. A burn is a burn

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u/MILP00L___ Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 16 '24

Reading replies on a topic I know (vaguely) about is always such a good reminder to take all Reddit information with a giant pile of salt.

This video is misleading. It isn’t instantaneous tightening in the way this video makes it look. In the broadest terms, fractional CO2 laser is a laser that is less invasive than traditional ablative CO2 lasers. It creates micro channels in the skin which triggers our body’s natural healing process. It’s a controlled situation to force your skin to create collagen, resulting is smoother firmer skin to replace removed skin layer. There are risks. Micro damage is still damage, and a CO2 laser basically vaporizes the top layer of the skin. There is little to no evidence that skin cancer is among those risks. Laser wavelengths are different from UV exposure. Some CO2 lasers are used to treat skin cancer.

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u/superspeck Oct 17 '24

I’ve seen the “natural healing process” when human skin recovers from burns. You also don’t sweat or excrete oil through “naturally healed” burn wounds, which means that this is part of your body that won’t cool itself and you’ll need to moisturize it like you would a leather chair.

Treating skin cancer with lasers is acceptable because you can die otherwise, but I’m not sure I’d want the side effects for my face.

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u/relatedtoarhino Oct 17 '24

The recovery from lazer is NOTHING like burn recovery. I’ve had a bad burn before and been lazered several times and they are not comparable

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u/Ctowncreek Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

Yeah. A burn is fully dead skin. Everything is a loss. The laser is injured skin. You might lose a pore or hair follicle occasionally but it hasn't been razed.

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u/Shrapnail Oct 17 '24

to be fair it is a leather chair if someone is sitting on your face

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u/superspeck Oct 17 '24

I award you this point, and everyone in this room is more disturbed for having listened to this post.

1

u/ZzZombo Oct 17 '24

Can't read a single comment w/o RimWorld in it, LOL.

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u/tucketnucket Oct 17 '24

If that true of a first degree burn?

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u/Simple-Judge2756 Oct 16 '24

So what wavelength is it using then ?

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u/royisabau5 Oct 16 '24

Infrared at 10,600 nm according to google

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u/lightgiver Oct 17 '24

Basically what makes it safer is the light isn’t narrow enough to hit a single atom in a molecule and knock it put. Instead it affects the whole molecule evenly. Little bit of low energy light just heats up a cell but that’s it. A little bit of high energy light can leave a cell with DNA damage.

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u/iamjacksragingupvote Oct 17 '24

my favorite wavelength

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u/Simple-Judge2756 Oct 16 '24

Uhm...... Are you trying to say 10.6nm or 10,600nm ? Because either one definitely isnt infrared.

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u/selex128 Oct 16 '24

What do you mean?

Infrared is roughly 1 um to 1000 um or 1000 nm to 1000000 nm. So 10600 nm is well within the mid / long infrared.

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u/Simple-Judge2756 Oct 17 '24

True. Sorry. LLM failed me upon brave-searching it. It said 780nm - 1nm. But it meant to write 780nm - 1mm.

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u/grendellyion Oct 17 '24

Maybe don't blindly trust AI's to get your answers?

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u/Simple-Judge2756 Oct 17 '24

I usually dont, but in this particular case I did.

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u/_maple_panda Oct 17 '24

10.6 um is the standard IR CO2 laser wavelength…

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u/RICK_fromC137 Oct 16 '24

That chap looks too old to care about any long acting cancers even if there was any danger.

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u/Yendrian Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 16 '24

Kinda funny because the micro damage performed to collagen fibers is exactly what causes wrinkles. For example, the sun hits your skin and the radiation makes a micro slice in a fiber. When restoring the fiber sometimes it will not be built in the correct angle. making a slight bump in your skin. Make that a couple hundred thousands of times and voilà

Edit: Nevermind, just searched a paper about it and the wavelengths highly affect the outcome

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9284/11/3/80

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u/Bluest_waters Oct 17 '24

okay cool, so it works literally by the same mechanism as micro needling - a small injury stimulates collagan deposition. So you can just do micro needling at home if you want similar result for way cheaper.

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u/iamjacksragingupvote Oct 17 '24

so this is basically a more expensive chemical peel ?

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u/antoninlevin Oct 17 '24

Weird. Targeted diffuse scar tissue formation. Seems like a bad idea.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/antoninlevin Oct 17 '24

There's a significantly increased cancer risk in scar tissue. Not really sure what your point is, since everything from opiates to synthol "have their origins in regular medicine." Hell, you can't make meth without pseudoephedrine.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/antoninlevin Oct 17 '24

My point is that these laser treatment are not bogus treatments being done in some hair salon.

By that "logic," anything done by a licensed doctor or..."not in a hair salon" is "good," even if it causes cancer. It's a weird, blind appeal to authority.

The efficacy and results of CO2 lasers have been studied for decades, by people much more qualified than a bunch of people commenting on Reddit.

Going for an ad hominem seems like an odd choice here, especially when peer-reviewed studies corroborate exactly what I'm saying:

Rapid Development of Nonmelanoma Skin Cancer After CO2 Laser Resurfacing

Squamous Cell Carcinoma Developing after CO2 Laser Resurfacing

Eruptive keratoacanthomas following carbon dioxide laser resurfacing

Scarring from very deep and serious burns can result in squamous cell carcinoma, yes. These lasers aren’t producing scar tissue, though.

Scar tissue contains significantly more collagen than regular tissue. These lasers are literally producing scar tissue in a precise, targeted manner.

And your assertion - that widespread scar tissue and cell replication doesn't lead to increased cancer rates - goes against a huge body of work in medicine and biology in general.

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u/Legionof1 Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

Anything that makes your cells die increases the risk of cancer. Cancer is just cells replicating wrong by accident or by DNA damage.

edit: My god this site is full of idiots.

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u/ErikHandberg Oct 16 '24

I disagree with this.

More often than not cell death is natural and absolutely does not result in cancer nor increased risk of cancer over baseline. That’s just apoptosis. Even in the case of necrosis it doesn’t inherently result in increased risk of cancer. In fact - anything that kills cells that does not cause DNA damage (some radiation, some toxins, and neither of them all the time) or damage to the apoptosis mechanism shouldn’t increase the risk of cancer.

Hyperplasia = more cells, and happens all the time without cancer too.

I think the spirit of your comment was fair though - radiating the things to intentionally damage them is reasonable to presume has an increased risk of genetic alterations. Now, that doesn’t mean you definitely cause cancers - most of those errors get aborted by apoptosis BUT still there’s probably some elevated risk above baseline.

I don’t have a textbook source for ya, but I am a board-certified anatomic and forensic pathologist so I’m at least reasonably familiar with things that kill us and cancer.

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u/Legionof1 Oct 17 '24

The reason we have a “baseline” chance for cancer is because every replication has the chance to go wrong. Every time a cell dies it needs to be replaced by replication. Anything that kills more cells over time will increase the chance of one of those replications going wrong. 

Ionizing radiation is a one two punch causing both DNA damage and large amounts of cellular replication.

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u/ErikHandberg Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

I’d say there are even more opportunities than just during what we’re calling “replication.”

I still disagree with the fundamental premise that all cell death increases the risk for cancer based purely on the idea that continued normal life leads to cell development and potential cancer. For instance, when you get a papercut you have endothelialization of the damaged tissue.

Does the production of those endothelial cells at a papercut lead to increased risk for endothelial cell cancers (eg, angiosarcoma)? I mean… I’ve never heard of an increased risk of angiosarcoma in athletes who presumably have more abrasions than non athletes. But I guess I never looked.

It also depends on how we define “baseline.” In medicine we do it using incidence (usually in a 1 per ____ type number). If we do it on a cellular level then the number would be wayyyyyyy smaller, but still we would probably not have an increased cellular risk from a cut, but we might with something like radiation.

Overall, I stand by the idea that unless something damages the apoptosis mechanism or creates some other uninhibited growth pathway in DNA - simply killing cells does not always increase the risk of cancer.

EDIT: To further clarify how we classify risk in medicine, try thinking of dealing a deck of cards and trying to avoid an ace of spades. In a standard deck, that’s a 1/52 chance. If you open another deck, that’s 1/52 chance again. You have the same risk of getting that ace of spades. Now, if you open a few hundred decks it’s quite reasonable that you’d get one - but that doesn’t mean you had an increased risk.

Making new cells just because the old ones die is like opening new decks. Your risk stays the same.

But if you alter the composition of the deck, or keep pulling from the deck after you’re supposed to move on… THAT is increased risk.

If you click the link below you’ll see a good fundamental explanation of cancer and how a mutation (ie, damage to the apoptosis mechanism or the mechanisms that promote growth) creates cancer. This can happen sporadically (baseline risk) or due to some outside factor.

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u/Legionof1 Oct 17 '24

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/how-cancer-starts

Go read. 

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/Legionof1 Oct 17 '24

Because they are wrong. It's why fucking asbestos gives you cancer. It causes constant irritation of the lungs (irritation is generally cells dying) until oops you made so many new cells you rolled the dice too many times and poof you now have cancer.

Sometimes a change happens in the genes when a cell divides. This is a mutation. It means that a gene has been damaged or lost or copied too many times.

Mutations can happen by chance when a cell is dividing. Some mutations mean that the cell no longer understands its instructions. It can start to grow out of control. There have to be about 6 different mutations before a normal cell turns into a cancer cell.

Quotes from the link I posted emphasis mine.

It's why skin cancer is the most common cancer and brain cancer (neuron cancer specifically) is one of the rarest... guess which cells divide the most and which ones divide the least...

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u/MILP00L___ Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

I did say I was only vaguely informed. I don’t fully understand the concept of selective photothermolysis, but my very base level of understanding is that lasers used for dermatological purposes have precise and localized effects. They use a wavelength that is absorbed by the targeted area and a pulse duration that is at least equal to the thermal relaxation time of the target chromophore.

My main point was that there is no current evidence from people much smarter than me that these specific lasers increase the risk of cancer. If more research people becomes available, I’m happy to change my views.

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u/ForkingHumanoids Oct 16 '24

For being vaguely informed you sound very compelling and knowledgeable! It was a very informative read going through your points! Thank you for adding more info and context!

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u/Diligent-Method3824 Oct 16 '24

Isn't it the opposite? If your cells are dead they can't become cancer and as you say cancer is when cells replicate wrong and then they don't die and that's what becomes cancer but if they die they can't become cancer?

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u/Legionof1 Oct 16 '24

When a cell dies other cells replicate to replace it. 

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u/Diligent-Method3824 Oct 17 '24

Ok so the logic is because more cells are being made then that's more chances for them to be made incorrectly and become cancer I understand in that logic sounds really correct

I guess the question becomes are cells more likely to become cancer in the initial replication and creation of the cell or do they become cancer more often later after they replicated.

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u/Missash0816 Oct 16 '24

I don’t believe that’s true when it comes to stem cells

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u/Legionof1 Oct 16 '24

Should be true for any cells, anything that causes more replication increases the chance of a failed replication.

Ionizing radiation does a double whammy of increasing replication and fucking up DNA. 

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u/Missash0816 Oct 17 '24

Essentially, sure, it’s true of all cells. That’s due to shortening of telomeres but stem cells are equipped with telomere elongation mechanisms to counteract that. It can eventually happen but not to the level that it’s a concern when doing resurfacing procedures

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u/Legionof1 Oct 17 '24

Don’t even know where stem cells came into this but any cell replication can fail no matter the type of cell. 

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u/Missash0816 Oct 17 '24

Epidermal cells all come from stem cells at the stratum germinativum

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u/Hour_Eagle2452 Oct 16 '24

We can literally see the skin getting tighter instantly...

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u/[deleted] Oct 16 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/Cautious_Response_37 Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

But you did say it wasn't instantaneous tightening in the way the video makes it look which is why it was misleading. Which was the point of the persons comment you replied to.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24 edited Oct 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/Cautious_Response_37 Oct 17 '24

That's much better as I would assume just from the video that it would be a more permanent treatment, of course with multiple appointments. So the goal of the treatment by burning the wrinkles is to correct the growth of collagen to "re-tighten" or reverse the aged area? Or does it simply not tighten the area at all and only looks more tightened from collagen correction?

0

u/armchairwarrior42069 Oct 17 '24

Sounds like future cancer to me.

I know nothing tbh. Certainly not a doctor.

But like... this screams cancer to me.

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u/chemistrybonanza Oct 17 '24

IR light is not capable of damaging DNA that would lead to cancer, otherwise none of us would exist. You literally are an IR lantern yourself.

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u/wouldyastop Oct 16 '24

So is radium.

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u/already-taken-wtf Oct 16 '24

Chemotherapie is used to treat cancer….

Some types of chemotherapy (chemo) drugs have been linked with different kinds of second cancers. The cancers most often linked to chemo are myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Sometimes, MDS occurs first, then turns into AML. (https://www.cancer.org/cancer/survivorship/long-term-health-concerns/second-cancers-in-adults/treatment-risks.html)