Vitiligo: Repigmenting Your Skin

To get repigmentation, new pigment cells must be produced from existing ones.

That means that new pigment cells must come from the base of hair follicles, from the edge of the lesion or from the patch of Vitiligo itself if depigmentation is not complete.

The maximum amount of repigmentation that can be expected in any one spot in a year of treatment is an eighth to a quarter of an inch.

In repigmentation therapy, a patient is given a psoralen drug and then is exposed to ultraviolet light A (UV-A). When psoralen drugs are activated by UV-A, they stimulate repigmentation by increasing the availability of color-producing cells at the skin's surface. The response varies among patients and body sites.

The psoralen drugs used for repigmentation therapy are trimethylpsoralen and 8-methoxy psoralen.

A patient takes the prescribed dose by mouth two hours before lying in the sun or under artificial ultraviolet (UV-A) light. The ideal time for natural sunlight is between 11 AM and 1 PM when the sun is highest. Treatment every other day is recommended. Too much ultraviolet light can be harmful.

All patients are not good candidates for repigmentation. The ideal person for this therapy should meet these requirements:

• Pigment loss of fewer than five years of duration for patients over 20 years of age. In general, children and young adults respond better than older people.
• Patients should be at least 10 years old. Treatment is safe for younger children, but because the method is tedious, better results are achieved when the child is interested in treatment.