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Welcome to Health Lab, your destination for news and stories about the future of healthcare. Today: Investigating How Dermal Injections Impact Aging Skin. A new study examines dermal injections and their impact on skin aging - turning back the clock on photoaging skin.

Chronic exposure of human skin to ultraviolet light causes premature aging, or photoaging. As the skin undergoes photoaging, type I collagen bundles, which are found in the dermis beneath the top layer of the skin and provide strength and support to the skin, become fragmented. This leads to wrinkles, fragility and loss of support and elasticity. 

Experts observed in a new study that injection of the most popular type of dermal filler, cross-linked hyaluronic acid, into photoaged skin could reverse the dermal changes associated with photoaging. 

These fillers are typically injected into the skin to reduce lines and wrinkles. They are thought to provide clinical improvement by adding volume to the skin, but researchers have found that cross-linked hyaluronic acid also stimulates production of new type I collagen in the dermis. 

The filler does so rapidly, stimulating collagen production within several weeks of injection, and is long-lasting, promoting the accumulation of more collagen over the course of a year. 

These findings indicate how the filler improves the appearance of skin in the short-term — a combination of space-filling and collagen. Additionally, since newly formed dermal collagen lasts many years, the findings also provide insight into how the filler can promote long-term clinical improvement, months or even a year after injection. 

For more on this story and for others like it, visit michiganmedicine.org/health-lab. Health Lab is a part of the Michigan Medicine Podcast Network, and is produced by the Michigan Medicine Department of Communication. You can subscribe to Health Lab wherever you listen to podcasts.