Research Finding New Properties of Vitamin C Supporting Youthful Skin Renewal
December 31, 2009 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis 
Photo courtesy of vitamincskin.com
Everyone’s always looking for healthy ways to look better. Well, here’s some research that might make you consider increasing your citrus intake, and maybe adding some beauty products containing Vitamin C to your regiment.
In a collaborative study, researchers from the University of Leicester in England and the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology in Portugal found a form of Vitamin C that helps promote wound healing and also helps protect the DNA in skin cells from damage.
The findings were published in the journal of Free Radical Biology and Medicine. On a technical note (and I will try to keep the jargon to a minimum), a free radical in medicine is commonly defined as an atom or molecule that has at least one unpaired electron and is therefore unstable and highly reactive.
In animal tissues, free radicals can damage cells, and there are theories that they can contribute to the accelerated progression of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and age-related diseases.
In the Vitamin C research, Dr. Tiago Duarte said the study analyzed how the human dermal fibroblasts (large flat cells in the connective tissue that secrete collagen and elastic fibers) are effected by “sustained exposure to a Vitamin C derivative, ascorbic acid 2-phosphate.”
A researcher with the IMCB, Duarte added, “We investigated which genes are activated by Vitamin C in these cells, which are responsible for skin regeneration. The results demonstrate that Vitamin C may improve wound healing by stimulating fibroblasts to divide and by promoting their migration into wounded areas.
“Vitamin C could also protect the skin by increasing the capacity of fibroblasts to repair potentially mutagenic DNA lesions.”