Category : Dermatology
Imagine looking into the mirror and seeing parts of your skin slowly lose their colour – not due to injury or infection, but silently, without pain. This is vitiligo – a common skin condition that affects nearly 1 in every 100 people worldwide, including children and young adults. While it is not contagious or life-threatening, it often leaves behind something deeper than white patches – stigma.
What is Vitiligo?
Vitiligo happens when the skin loses melanocytes, which are the pigment-producing cells that give skin, hair, and eyes their colour. Without them, skin turns white. These patches may appear anywhere on the body including the face, hands, lips, or feet and though they cause no physical pain, they can deeply affect self-esteem and social confidence. Many people wrongly associate vitiligo with poor hygiene or assume it’s infectious, leading to unnecessary isolation.
Medical Treatments: First Line, Not Final Line
Treatment typically begins with creams, oral medications, or phototherapy, which is exposure to controlled ultraviolet(UV) light. These methods help many, but not all. In some cases, particularly when the disease is stable but the patch wouldn’t repigment, surgery becomes the superhero in a white coat.
Surgical Magic: Replanting Color
Skin grafting is a proven, low-cost and cosmetically satisfying and safe option for stable vitiligo. The principle is simple: borrow melanocytes from healthy pigmented skin and plant them onto the white patch, like re-seeding a lawn.
There are several methods:
- Mini-punch grafting, which uses tiny dots of normal skin (1-2 mm in size), punched out and inserted into the white patch.
- Suction blister grafting which lifts only the outer layer of skin (epidermis) using suction cups.
- Epidermal cell suspension, which is the most advanced and can be described as a few centimeters of donor skin enzymatically processed in the lab to extract melanocytes, which are then sprayed or smeared over large patches.
What to Expect?
Surgery is usually done under local anesthesia and takes over 2-3 hours.Most patients walk out the same day. Re-Pigmentation doesn’t happen overnight, but it usually takes 3-6 months to match the surrounding skin. A regular follow-up with sunlight or artificial UV therapy boosts results.
Public Health Perspective
In a world obsessed with fairness creams, it’s ironic how unfair life can be to those who lose their colour. Vitiligo has no link to race, diet, or infection, rather is just a biological glitch. With safe, effective, and accessible surgery options now available at centres like JSS Hospital, Mysuru, there’s hope to not just treat skin, but heal identities. Let’s normalize the patch, but also offer the option of healing, as and when desired.
By,
Dr.Sri Lakshmi N and Dr.Chitwan G
Department of Dermatology
JSS Hospital, Mysuru.