American scientists have developed a new laser technique that can melt away fat, thereby offering a new way to beat heart disease, cellulite and the dreaded acne. Scientists at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and Harvard Medical School have used a machine called as free-electron laser (FEL), which produces high-intensity laser beams, to target fat under the skin and melt it away without affecting normal tissue.
This new finding offers hope for people with dangerous build-up of atherosclerotic plaque, unwanted cellulite and acne. "The root cause of acne is a lipid-rich gland, the sebaceous gland, which sits a few millimeters below the surface of the skin," said Dr Rox Anderson, the lead author of the study, which will be presented at 26th annual meeting of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS). "We want to be able to selectively target the sebaceous gland, and this research shows that if we can build lasers at this region of the spectrum, we may be able to do that." The researchers first exposed human fat taken from surgically discarded normal tissue to range of wavelengths of infrared laser light and compared this with how pure distilled water was heated up with the same wavelengths.
It was found that water got heated with most IR wavelengths, but at 915, 1210 and 1720 nm, fat was better heated than water. In the next step the researchers exposed intact skin and fat pig samples to wavelengths of 1210 and 1720 nm using the free-electron laser infrared light. It was found that 1210 nm wavelength was able to heat up the pig fat up to a depth of 1 centimeter without affecting the overlying skin. "We can envision a fat-seeking laser, and we're heading down that path now," Anderson stressed. Laser treatments have previously been used for atherosclerosis, but none of these treatments was able to achieve the accuracy that is now promised by the FEL.
Anderson acknowledged that the work would not have been possible without the advanced knowledge of physics that allowed the Free-Electron Laser (FEL) to be built at Jefferson Lab and a grant from the Department of Defense to find out the possible medical uses of the FELs.
