Your skin keeps no secrets. It will give away your age, your health habits, your diet, whether you smoke – in short, your life is an open book, and that book is written in your skin. Now, new therapies using cutting edge technologies and knowledge could hold the key to rewriting that book through alternative anti-aging therapies. The technologies being explored include stem cell therapies and other skin rejuvenation techniques.

In the past, anti-aging specialists focused on removing the most obvious signs of aging, wrinkles and age spots. More recently, doctors have come to realize that there’s far more to rejuvenating the face and skin than just pulling out the wrinkles. In fact, one of the most obvious signs of youth is the fullness and roundness of the face. The face loses volume in large part because aging skin cells lose the ability to hold onto the fat and collagen that gives them their structure. The result is thin, delicate, wrinkle-prone skin – aged skin. Some doctors believe the answer lies in replenishing the body’s supply of stem cells, the cells in every body that have the ability to become the type of cell needed by specific organs and tissues.

How Anti-aging Stem Cell Therapy Works

Stem cells are different from other cells in the way they reproduce. Most of your cells can only produce copies of themselves. If they’ve become structurally damaged, the new copies will often replicate that damage. Stem cells, on the other hand, can reproduce other stem cells like themselves. They also can produce cells that have the potential to differentiate themselves into the type of cells needed by your various systems – that is, stem cells can grow skin cells, bone cells, muscle cells and more.

Stem cells also serve as a sort of internal repair system for many of the body’s tissues, including the skin. The essentially divide without limit as long as the body is alive. When skin cells are damaged, stem cells replace them with new skin cells. As we age, however, our bodies contain fewer and fewer stem cells.

A number of anti-aging specialists offer anti-aging treatments using stem cells taken from the patient’s own body in an outpatient procedure. The doctor simply draws blood or fat from the patient, uses a specialized centrifuge to extract and concentrate the stem cells, and re-injects the concentrated stem cells, often fortified with hyaluronic acid or platelet rich plasma, two other substances that support the work of the stem cells.

This is just one of the many new anti-aging therapies that make use of cutting edge technologies and research into stem cells. Others go far beyond skin rejuvenation to promise anti-aging effects throughout your body in every system.