What prompted you to study the use of tretinoin for the treatment of photo- and intrinsically aged skin?
After tretinoin was introduced, females in their 30s and 40s who were using it to treat their post-adolescent acne told me that they were pleased with its efficacy for controlling their acne outbreaks. A number of women also described added benefits of improvement in wrinkles, blotchiness, skin tone, and texture. At first, I tended not to pay too much attention to those reports because I wasn’t aware of any mechanism whereby tretinoin might modulate such changes. Over time, however, as more women reported the same effects, I realized tretinoin might represent a real phenomenon that should be documented with well-designed studies using photographic assessments, objective bioengineering techniques, and histological evaluation. Q What is your opinion about the effectiveness and side effects of other retinoids, i.e., adapalene (Differin) and tazarotene (Avage), to treat photo-aged skin? All of the topical retinoids effectively treat actinically damaged skin. Relative to tretinoin, adapalen
