This week, Géraldine Zamansky talks about a disease known as vitiligo. A new treatment could change the daily lives of people with vitiligo, this depigmentation of the skin. A new cream will be available in about a year, in pharmacies.
Géraldine Zamansky, journalist for the Magazine de la Santé on France 5, tells us today about a disease that many French people discovered on the face of Édouard Philippe, when he was Prime Minister, vitiligo. A disease that the sportswoman, animator, Nathalie Simon, former windsurfing champion, suffering from this depigmentation on her hands for 24 years, decided to put forward, to fight against received ideas.
franceinfo: Géraldine, are you talking to us today about a hope for a solution for people whose skin is discolored?
Geraldine Zamansky: Yes, some of you may have already heard of a cream that allows for the first time to restore the color of the skin, totally discolored in places. Because in fact, even so-called “white” skin is always a little pigmented. It is thanks to particular cells, the melanocytes.
In vitiligo, they are attacked by immune defenses, and this creates these very white areas of skin, as on Édouard Philippe’s face indeed. It can be very difficult to live with. So Pr Julien Seneschal, dermatologist specializing in vitiligo at the Bordeaux University Hospital, saw patients transform by participating in the international clinical trial of this new cream. Their entire face had sometimes fully “recovered” after a year.
This treatment would succeed in repairing the attacked cells?
Rather, it succeeds in blocking the effects of this attack on the “dye” cells of the skin. However, we all have little factories in our skin. These are the “stem” cells, capable of creating several types of cells, to heal a wound for example.
Once the attack is stopped by the cream, these “factories” can therefore, among other things, produce new melanocytes! That takes time. But within a few months, if the patients in the clinical trial applied their cream well every day, the skin regained its natural color.
You talk about it in the past tense, as if these patients no longer had this cream today?
And yes, because after a clinical trial, it takes time for official validations. The cream has just obtained marketing authorization, given by Europe. But there is still a need for French arbitration on its reimbursement and its price. Professor Julien Seneschal hopes for a solution in a year.
In the meantime, there may be solutions with other creams, not really created against vitiligo, and moderate sun exposure. Because UV will stimulate the production of destroyed cells, melanocytes, to protect the skin by making it tan. Be careful, provided you do it outside the hottest hours, and stopping as soon as the skin turns slightly pink.
Patients can already attenuate the contrasts. But it’s up to all of us to change our outlook, so that this disease is less difficult to bear.