Can CoQ10 benefit skin by defending against sun damage and the ravages of aging? Medical research says the answer is yes.
The summer sun brightens our days, lifts our spirits, and boosts our vitamin D levels, but it’s also potentially damaging to the skin. Exposure to the sun’s rays can accelerate skin aging, causing wrinkles, sagging, discoloration, and age spots.
Wrinkles appear when the skin loses elasticity. This may be due to a number of factors, many of them age-related. As we get older skin cells divide more slowly and the inner skin, or dermis, grows thinner.
The layer of fat cells beneath the dermis starts to atrophy, as does the network of collagen and elastin fibers that support the skin.
As a result, the outer skin, or epidermis, is less resilient and loses much of its ability to retain moisture. This makes it less elastic, and the results are sagging skin and wrinkles.
Sun Exposure Can Accelerate Aging and Damage Skin
Exposure to the sun can not only exacerbate the effects of aging on skin, it can create additional damage known as photoaging.
Researchers estimate that about 90% of the symptoms of premature skin aging can be attributed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which can damage the crucial collagen fibers that are the skin’s major structural protein.
In addition, sun exposure can cause an accumulation of abnormal elastin fibers.
Under ideal circumstances, elastin is the protein that enables the skin to stretch, but the abnormal elastin fibers produced by sun exposure actually degrade collagen and the result is sagging and wrinkling of the skin.
Coenzyme Q10 can play a role in maintaining more youthful looking skin
CoQ10 is a natural substance found in every cell in the body.
Its primary function is to assist in the production of energy at the cellular level, and in that capacity, it can be an important resource for maintaining youthful, healthy skin.
By boosting energy production in the cells, The coenzyme supports the skin’s collagen/elastic structural framework, slows down the thinning of the sub-dermal layer of fat cells, and improves the skin’s ability to retain moisture.
CoQ10 is also a powerful antioxidant, and as such can be an invaluable tool for defending against skin aging. Antioxidants are substances which can neutralize free radicals, which are unstable molecules created by the process of cellular oxidation.
Free radicals scavenge and damage the cells with which they interact, and free radical damage has been implicated as a causal factor in many illnesses, including most age-related diseases and disorders.
Since exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays is known to create extensive free radical damage to the skin, antioxidant CoQ10’s neutralizing, healing and cell repair ability make it an important preventative as well as a treatment for sun-damaged skin.
