Depigmentation or vitiligo is an incurable skin disorder affecting 1% of the world’s population. It is an autoimmune disease, meaning that the body destroys its own tissue. In certain cases it is caused by the disorders of the thyroid gland or the adrenal glands.

Vitiligo is an incurable disease, but it can be made asymptomatic: symptoms can entirely or partially disappear but may come back with different intensity. We recommend maintenance treatment to avoid a relapse.

On certain areas of the skin depigmented, sharp-contoured, white spots appear due to the lack of melanocytes (melanin-producing cells), or because they do not produce any pigments. White spots are most likely to appear symmetrically on the limbs or around the orifices, but they may affect more than 50% of the entire body. Affected areas have no protection whatsoever against light, which means that even the slightest amount of sunlight can cause inflammation and blisters. (Not every white spot is vitiligo!)

 

As a result of UVB-therapy, small pigmented areas appear on the white spots and in more than two-thirds of the cases repigmentation is more than 75 %.

 

Experts from the 2004 American Academy of Dermatology Congress, where UVB-phototherapy was recommended as the number one treatment for those cases when more than 15-20% of the body is affected: “Narrowband UVB has become my treatment of choice for patients with moderate to severe vitiligo, defined as having more than 15 to 20 percent body surface area involvement”.

 

From the studies published on the website of the leading dermatologist’s magazine, American Dermatology Times and the American Academy of Dermatology:

The following research in 2003 considered successful only those cases that showed a minimum of 50% (!) repigmentation: “Treatment response, defined as >50 percent repigmentation, was achieved in 25 (42 percent) of the 60 patients with 20 patients (33 percent) achieving >75 percent repigmentation.”

 

The average appearance of repigmentation on the body: on lower limbs an average 42%, on the torso an average 40%, on the upper limbs an average 28%.

 

 

Unfortunately, in the case of vitiligo a greater than 25-30% repigmentation happens very rarely on the soles and the back of the hands. “Lesions of the hands and feet rarely repigmented more than 25 percent.”