Spectra Acne Laser Peel Consultation

• Limits the thermal effect to a minimum ensuring that the treatment is gentle for all skin types and without risk of bruising.
• Fast and efficient treatments that take, depending on the amount of treatment area, only 5 – 10 minutes to complete.
• High patient satisfaction and a significant reduction in redness in just a few treatments.

What causes redness?

Acne is one of the most common dermatological conditions, which mainly affects adolescents, but can affect adults at almost any age. Many factors can contribute to acne breakouts including stress, diet, and other diseases, and the severity of breakouts can range from a few postules, papules, or comedones to a dense covering of the face or back that can be debilitating to adults and adolescents alike. During an inflammatory acne breakout, erythema develops around the follicular openings. Frustratingly, this redness can persist long after the acne itself. While the reason for this is not fully understand, it is likely due to a change in the superficial dermis microvascular structures.

Why include treatment of redness that can remain after acne is resolved in your practice?

Most dermatological practices have a high volume of acne patients and use many approaches to treat active acne. Patients not only want the active lesions to clear up, but they also want the blemished skin to clear up as well. For most patients, depending on the severity of the acne lesions, they have to wait many months for the microvasculature to return to normal for the redness to go away. During this period, make-up or other cover-ups can reduce the appearance of the redness, but for most patients the redness remains providing an unpleasant reminder to themselves and others of the acne breakout they endured.

How do lasers and energy based treatments work?

Lasers have been used for several decades to treat many types of vascular conditions. The 585 nm wavelength is preferred for vascular redness due to that wavelength’s high absorption by oxy-hemoglobin - the oxygen carrying molecule in red blood cells. In addition, the 585 nm penetrates deeply enough into the skin to reach the target very tiny vessels that are the cause of diffuse redness while sparing the deeper and larger vessels reducing the risk of bruising.

Why is the Lutronic solution better?

Traditionally, the 585 nm dye lasers used relatively long-pulse widths (many milliseconds) to thermally damage and coagulate the blood vessels. This treatment, however, may cause unwanted thermal damage to the surrounding tissue and consequently often caused bruising. Lutronic has introduced the 5mm Gold 585nm handpiece onto the 5 nanosecond Q-Switched Nd:YAG Spectra laser. The extremely short nanosecond pulse, a thousand times shorter than a millisecond, and the low fluence used for treatment, limits the thermal effect to a minimum ensuring that the treatment is gentle for all skin types and without risk of bruising. The large 5mm spot size, and up to 10 pulses per second repetition rate offers fast and efficient treatments that take, depending on the amount of treatment area, only 5 – 10 minutes to complete.

The efficacy of Lutronic’s approach was published in a 20 patient study in which the Q-Switched 5mm 585 treatment showed high patient satisfaction and a significant reduction in redness in just a few treatments.