Saranya Wyles, M.D., Ph.D.

Skin health is an incredible part of how we age systemically.

Skin is our largest organ.

Think about it as our longest relationship.

And it's our most visible biomarker of how we're aging on the inside.

So looking at skin was a natural way to see how cues of systemic aging and systemic health could just present on your skin.

So at Mayo Clinic, I lead a research lab called the Regenerative Dermatology and Skin Longevity Lab.

And we started exploring these different biomarkers, starting from how the skin ages naturally with age and how inflammatory skin diseases like atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, and even aspects of wound healing can be disrupted with age.

Yeah.

So the skin is the naturally largest regenerative organ.

So our skin turns over every 30 days.

So every 30 days, the skin rebuilds and the rest becomes, I call it dust on the floor, right?

So it basically sheds over.

And this process is how we can kind of time the different ways that the skin is showing healthy barrier and healthy barrier repair.

Okay.

So when the skin starts to age, there are two aspects of change that we can look at.

There is structural change and there is functional change.

So structural change, this is what we're seeing physically.

Some things like how our melanocytes are aging.

you know, we lose melanocytes over time and about 10% or 20% with each decade, you lose melanocytes.

And this is your active melanin production.