Professor Daisuke Tsuruta, Associate Professor Hisamichi Imanishi, and graduate student Ayaka Matsumoto of the Department of Dermatology at the Osaka Municipal University Graduate School of Medicine, together with Science Co., Ltd., have confirmed the effectiveness of ultra-fine bubble (UFB) showers for treating atopic dermatitis.
Atopic dermatitis is a chronic skin disease that affects many people, significantly impairing their quality of life due to itching and eczema. It is believed that the disease can be caused or aggravated by genetic factors as well as environmental factors such as allergies. Although progress is being made in the development of treatments, there are cases in which drugs cannot be used due to the risk of side effects, and there are also issues with the cost of treatments, so there is a demand for methods to alleviate symptoms without using drugs.
On the other hand, bathing and showering have been reported to improve the skin barrier function abnormality in atopic dermatitis. UFBs, discovered in Japan, are air bubbles with a diameter of less than 1 μm and are becoming more common in showers and baths, but their effect on skin diseases has been unknown until now.
In this study, we examined the effect of UFB showers on atopic dermatitis using two mouse models: mice that developed atopic dermatitis due to genetic factors and mice that developed atopic dermatitis due to mite antigens (environmental factors).
As a result, it was found that in mice with environmentally-induced atopic dermatitis, applying a UFB shower or a normal shower to the affected area for one minute per day for a total of 1 to 1 days suppressed inflammation and improved the thickness of the skin caused by inflammation. Furthermore, the group of mice exposed to a UFB shower also showed an improvement in the skin barrier function. However, in mice with genetically-induced atopic dermatitis, there was no change due to the shower treatment.
This study demonstrated that UFB showers may be a new treatment for allergen-induced atopic dermatitis. In the future, it will be necessary to examine the long-term effects of UFB shower treatment in humans.
Paper information:【Frontiers in Immunology】Beneficial effects of ultrafine bubble shower on a mouse model of atopic dermatitis
