What Causes Retention Hyperkeratosis ?

In my last post we talked about What Is Acne
This is where I discussed that acne was a inflammatory skin disease and not a skin condition.

What Happens Differently In Acne

As I have discussed Retention hyperkeratosis is at the very heart and soul of acne, and it is the process you must interfere with in order to outfox the disease. The stratum corneum sloughs off a layer of cells each day very easily, but not very well inside the pore.  The dead cells begin to stick together and form a mass (impaction) down inside the follicle. The chemical compisition of our sebum is not sticky, the sticky part is the dead skin cells in the follicle brought on by Acne Bio-Film (we will get to that in the next article).  So acne is the renention of dead skin cells and the mad proliferation of additional cells to make matters worse in the pores of acne-susceptible families.

What Cause Retention Hyperkeratosis?

There are lamellar granules present in the the skin which produce an enzyme to break down the ‘glue’ between skin cells in order for them to be sloughed off in a normal manner.  This leads to congestion in the follicles.  There are many of these granules down in a healthy pore where the layer is normal and thin, but if you look onto an acne-affected follicle with it's thicker layer, there are few granules.

A popular misconception about acne is that the oil hardens and plugs up the pore opening.  This in not true. The oil plays only a minor part in the acne impaction. It is the retained cells, not sebum, that produces the mass itself. In fact, as the lesion develops, the sebaceous glands become smaller, and whatever oil they continue to produce is not actually trapped. Studies show that a clear channel is always maintained between the sebaceous gland and the surface. The channel appears to be kept open by protein- digestive enzymes that gradually digest the dead skin cells in the center of a lesion.  This explains why an acne impaction often reaches a certain size then appears to stop growing. Even though more cells are rapidly being produced by the follicular wall, the lesion does not enlarge because the cells next to the bacteria on the inside are being digested about as rapidly as new cells are being dumped into the impaction. This happens in the mildest form of acne Grade 1.  The white heads and blackheads reach a certain size but do not burst into inflamed acne.

Stay tuned for my next post where we will talk about P-acne bacteria and Acne Bio Film