Stretch Marks and Preganancy - What You Need to Know

For women who want to have babies, one of the main concerns is what they would look after giving birth. This is a valid concern, since there would be some drastic changes and alterations to the basic structure of a woman’s body during pregnancy and during childbirth. Aside from the expansion of the girth of a woman to accommodate the child, even the bones of the woman become spongy (especially in the cervical area) and thus, some women lose their flexibility and sometimes even their physical ability to balance themselves while walking. These are all intrinsic changes, but how about the skin? One of the first things that you would notice when you are pregnant is that the skin becomes doubly active during pregnancy. Sweating is doubled, and it seems that the skin is either very dry or very moist due to the extra secretions being produced by the skin. Again, this is normal. Sometimes, harmless rashes even appear in the morning. And then we have stretch marks. Stretch marks are never pleasant to see when you are the woman, and countless women have scratched their way to having very prominent “badges of honor” indeed. It’s true that often, when you start scratching the sites where stretch marks would form, the skin would become redder, and the stretch marks would become more prominent. nnnCurrent Statistics It has been noted that generally, 90% of all women are afflicted with striae or stretch marks. Some of these women aren’t even pregnant. Some were born slim, gained a little weight and woke up one day with spidery web work already running across their shoulders, abdominal area and sometimes even their thighs. It’s genetic, so one really shouldn’t be blaming anyone for the existence of these stretch marks. And since it’s inherited, we can safely assume that our parents inherited them from their parents as well. It’s cyclical, which means we shouldn’t really be troubled by its natural passage in the human body. Pregnancy is one of the times that you would notice the existence of these striae, but children entering puberty also have them. Males are actually more prone to stretch marks in this age, as vertical growth is often also accompanied by horizontal growth. nnnTretinoin A certain cream, which is purported to have contained the chemical compound tretinoin, is showing promise in slowly diminishing the general appearance of stretch marks. The cream, which is basically just a medium to deliver generic tretinoin is applied for more than 5 months. Researchers at the University of Michigan have found out that shrinking occurs with the repeated use of the active ingredient. A control group, which did not use the tretinoin-based cream or used other means to shrink their stretch marks, reported an increase in the size, rather than a decrease. It should be noted that if anyone would want to use the active ingredient tretinoin should do so immediately, in the earliest stages of stretch mark because the active ingredient seems to have little effect on stretch marks that have already established themselves on the skin for longer periods of time. nn