Contact us to make an appointment to discuss your rosacea at our Melbourne clinic.
Where rosacea appears
Rosacea usually shows up in the middle section of your face, but it can also appear on the chest area, back, and possibly the scalp.
When we diagnose rosacea, we’re looking for certain key elements, including a redness of the central face that persists, and small visible blood vessels on the nose and cheeks. Rosacea may also present with swollen red bumps, sometimes containing pus, which may be mistaken for acne. Skin usually feels hot and may be tender.
One manifestation of rosacea is known as rhinophyma, and affects the tissue of the nose, making it seem bulbous due to thickened skin. Men are affected more often than women. A disfigured nose can be a source of great distress, however, rhinophyma can be improved significantly with treatments at our Melbourne clinic, particularly using laser treatments. A normal nose appearance can usually be restored with a few treatments.
Some people with rosacea get dry, sore, uncomfortable eyes with swollen, red eyelids. Eye symptoms may appear first, prior to any skin symptoms.
How to deal with the flushing of rosacea
Rosacea flushing can be quite intense for the person experiencing it. It can become a force of its own accord, with no immediately obvious treatment strategy for managing it, even avoiding triggers. Sometimes, rosacea can feel completely out of control.
Each of you with rosacea has your own very special set of symptoms that affect you slightly differently to others with rosacea, since the manifestation is determined by your unique biology. Some of you may have unusual or specific triggers or relievers. This is normal for rosacea.
Medication isn’t always very effective for rosacea, though in some people it works very well. Your treatment may also contain laser treatments for blood vessel reduction, but this again will depend on what presentation your rosacea has. There are several options to try.
Medications we use – Rosacea dermatologist
Antihistamines or aspirin may be useful in some people to reduce flushing in the short-term, so if you ate something spicy, you could use this medication as a tool in a more immediate fashion, under the guidance of your dermatologist.
Medication is useful in some people to treat the small bumps/pimples of rosacea. We might also use beta-blockers or clonidine for stress-related flushing, caused by your autonomic nervous system.
How your autonomic nervous system causes flushing
Your autonomic nervous system – your unconscious nervous system – can cause flushing that is completely out of your control. This tends to be the ambient temperature (too hot, too cold), exercise, or after a hot drink, but it can also be set off when you’re nervous or stressed – or even really excited.
Getting too hot and what to do about flushing
These rosacea triggers are all you getting ‘too hot’, or your body needing to offload some heat, which it does by opening up your blood vessels wider, to allow more blood through, to provide more surface area for the heat to be transferred out of your blood (body) to your skin, through your blood vessels. Once the heat leaves your skin, your body becomes cooler, and your autonomic nervous system is happy again. Rosacea flush over.
What you can do then to help your autonomic nervous system get back into temperate balance is cool yourself down – you can use a fan, wet towel, or drink cold water. Anything that reduces your temperature back to a normal temperature can be used to control flushing caused by your autonomic nervous system’s temperature control system.
Getting stressed and what to do about flushing
Stress – a surge of adrenalin and cortisol into your blood – is a sure-fire way to get a flush episode of rosacea, but we don’t always get to control our stress levels as much as we might like. If you are a nervous or anxious person, or operating in a high-stress environment, you may be getting a lot of stress-hormone-related rosacea flushing. In this case, you may benefit greatly from stress management techniques. You can’t stop the stress, but you can control your response to it.
Managing your stress response could include many elements, for example mindfulness and deliberate relaxation techniques, using ‘rewiring’ behavioural techniques like neurolinguistic programming (NLP), taking medication, or a collection of many of these tools. Having an out-of-control stress response is damaging to many systems, so taking a closer look at what your brain and body is reacting to, and modifying your response as much as you can, is a useful rosacea management technique.
How we treat rosacea at our Melbourne clinic
Treating rosacea takes a combined approach in most people. We cannot cure your rosacea, but we can help you manage the symptoms.
Your rosacea will be assessed based on your specific symptoms and triggers, and your treatment may include some of the following:
- Topical antibiotics (clindamycin, erythromycin, metronidazole)
- Glycolic peels/preparations
- Gels to constrict blood vessels in rosacea-prone areas
- Vascular laser treatments
- Systemic (oral) antibiotics (tetracycline, macrolides, erythromycin, roxithromycin, azithromycin, clarithromycin, metronidazole)
- Isotretinoin (usually used if antibiotics have failed)
Trigger avoidance will be high on the list of things to learn about, including general measures to keep your skin cool, stay out of the sun, and avoid any known triggers of yours.
Rosacea and microbes
Some rosacea has been associated with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), some small mites, and Helicobacter pylori infection of the gut, so if your rosacea is in conjunction with intestinal disruptions of any kind, mention this to your doctor and ask their advice, particularly if your rosacea outbreak has coincided with digestive issues.
Again, rosacea doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and while we can’t always see what’s causing it, something is. Figuring out what that thing is isn’t always easy to do – and sometimes we’ll never know, but it’s worth trying to figure out.
How vascular lasers work to reduce visible blood vessels and redness
A vascular laser works by zapping the blood vessels closer to the skin. There is some evidence that damaged blood vessels release chemicals that cause rosacea to appear and progress over time. Treating the blood vessels by getting rid of them completely (don’t worry, you still have loads more!) means that we can really reduce some symptoms of rosacea.
Laser treatments can also complement other treatments, but without the side effects often present with topical treatments. Multiple treatments will likely be required.
The laser we use to treat rosacea in our Melbourne clinic
We use the Cutera laser with the Excel V and Genesis components. This laser is considered one of the best in the world for treating facial redness, targeting visible blood vessels, and the blood vessels that are deeper into the skin, while also treating general redness. Other lasers may struggle to get as good results for rosacea.
Repeated treatments may be necessary every few years, but this will depend heavily on your specific type of rosacea presentation.
How laser works to treat rosacea
Vascular rosacea tends to respond well to laser and light therapies. Heat from the laser beam hits the capillaries that leads to general redness, and destroys them. The body then reabsorbs the dead cells during its regular ‘garbage collection’, and the cells disappear. Effects are immediate, but also improve over the coming weeks as the cells are reabsorbed.
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*Results may vary from person to person
