Personalized lifestyle medicine is a subject area I believe will play an important role in skincare in the future and I am very excited to be attending the Mastering the Implementation of Personalized Lifestyle Medicine conference in Chicago this week. The event is primarily for medical doctors practising holistic and functional medicine in the US but as skincare personalisation is a key theme of my research and the US provides an innovative environment for research, I am interested in learning more.

The conference focus is on Synchronizing Metabolic Rhythms for Clinical Success.

The successful clinical application of personalized lifestyle medicine requires an understanding of how alterations in physiological systems relate to the development of complex chronic disease. One of the factors that is starting to be recognized as highly significant is the time-dependent interaction of a person’s genetics with their lifestyle, diet and environment to create patterns of health or disease.

Biorhythms regulate the way an individual’s body responds to their environment and lifestyle at any specific moment in time. These rhythms include the fluctuation of hormones, neurotransmitters, transcription factors that control genetic expression, inflammatory mediators, anabolic and catabolic metabolic functions, and stem cell-associated tissue regeneration. Clinically, they are connected to alterations in sleep cycles, function of the reproductive system, blood sugar regulation, digestive flux, alterations in detoxification function, cellular renewal, changes in microbiome activity that influence central nervous system activity, and the regulation of immune and nervous system functions.

Although I don’t deal with diseases, ageing is affected by all of these processes and the circadian clocks have been paid more attention recently. In my personalised skincare consultations, I pay attention to the quality of restorative processes, such as sleep and yoga relaxation, as well as their timing in the day. The skin status changes with the midday circadian peak of sebum excretion, which may affect an acne prone skin type in a negative way.

The traditional Chinese medicine paid attention to organ activation in different times and although modern medicine has not fully engaged with the system to date, this event might be a first step in this direction.

Further reading: My blog on Personalisation in Skincare

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