Everyone has bad days. But usually online, we only see peoples good ones. However, we all know thats not reality and thats precisely the inspiring message from Carys Gray, a fitness blogger whos being praised after sharing an honest makeup-free photo of herself during an eczema flareup. MODEL'S AMAZING JOURNEY FROM PREGNANT TO 6-PACK Gray, who has more than 148,000 followers on the social media platform, shows two photos of herself in the viral image: one with her eczema under control and makeup on her face, and another with her eczema flared up and her face makeup-free. Social media/Instagram will show the good days, Gray wrote in part in the now viral post, which had garnered over 80,000 likes as of Tueday afternoon. But here's a reminder that next time you see something on social media that you think is 'goals' that it's not the full story, it's not how that person will look or be alllllll the time! Eczema, or atopic dermatitis, is a chronic skin condition that causes redness and itchiness, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can occur at any age, and it does not have a cure. THIS FIT MOM DROPPED 6 DRESS SIZES BY LOSING … Continue reading →

Cultivating 'friendly' bacteria from people's skin makes it possible to develop personalised lotions to treat skin conditions like eczema, a new study shows. It's the latest evidence that beneficial bacteria in our microbiome can be used to treat infections spurred by harmful microbes, and could provide a new direction in antibiotics research: something we desperately need, in light of rising antimicrobial resistance. While everybody's skin is populated with a mixture of healthy and harmful bacteria, the ratio of good to bad isn't always the same. This imbalance could help to explain why some people have conditions like atopic dermatitis (AD) the most common form of eczema, which produces inflamed and irritated skin, and affects almost 18 million Americans. "People with this type of eczema, for some reason that's not quite known yet, have a lot of bacteria on the skin, but it's the wrong type of bacteria," dermatologist Richard Gallo from UC San Diego told the Associated Press. "They're not producing the antimicrobials they need." To find out about the makeup of these bacteria populations, Gallo and his team examined skin culture swabs taken from 30 healthy people and 49 subjects with AD. After screening thousands of colonies of bacteria, … Continue reading →

February 28, 2017 Womens stress levels before pregnancy could influence risk of eczema in child. Credit: University of Southampton Infants whose mothers who felt stressed before they fell pregnant had a higher risk of eczema at age 12 months, new Southampton research has shown. The study from the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton, is the first to link preconception maternal stress to the risk of atopic eczema in the child. The researchers believe the findings support the concept that eczema partly originates as a baby develops in the womb and could reveal ways of reducing the risk of the skin condition. The research, published in Clinical and Experimental Allergy, assessed the stress levels of women recruited to the Southampton Women's Survey before they were pregnant. They were asked to report how stressed they were in their daily lives. A sub-group were asked about their psychological wellbeing. Around 3,000 babies born into the Survey were then assessed for eczema at ages six and 12 months. Dr Sarah El-Heis, the study's lead researcher from the University of Southampton, comments: "We know that maternal stress can release certain hormones that can have an effect on the baby's immune response, … Continue reading →

Teruaki Nakatsuji and Richard Gallo from the University of California, San Diego, have discovered that some bacteria which naturally live on human skin produce chemicals that kill S. aureus[a bacterium that can cause severe skin infections]. [The duo then] went after the bacteria themselvesisolating them from people with a skin disease called atopic dermatitis (eczema), growing them, and adding them to a cream. The result: a personalized ointment for killing S. aureusand hopefully treating eczemausing bacteria that come from a persons own skin. The team focused on one [type of bacterium]a strain of S. hominis called A9Strain A9 produces several new antibiotics that seem to specifically suppress the growth of S. aureus, including the drug-resistant versions that we know as MRSA. Protective staph strains like A9 dominate the skins of healthy people, buteven in people with eczema, the protective strains arent totally absent. Theyre still there. So what happens if you give them a boost? As expected, the levels of S. aureus fell by more than 90 percent. In two cases, the troublesome microbe disappeared entirely. Its a big step towards using microbial therapies to treat skin disease, says Shruti Naik, from Rockerfeller University. The GLP aggregated and excerpted this … Continue reading →