Antioxidant, anti-aging cream passes multifaceted evaluations

Key Points

Winnipeg, Manitoba - A new, antioxidant-rich anti-aging cream (Concentrated Restorative Cream; vitamin C ester, dimethylaminoethanol/DMAE, tocotrienols; N.V. Perricone, M.D.) has demonstrated effectiveness in a variety of subjective and objective measurements, researchers say.

"We used a three-pronged approach, including objective evaluation, an expert grader and a consumer-acceptance questionnaire," says Nalini Kaul, M.S., Ph.D., an investigator and consultant for Hill Top Research, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She co-authored the study with Elsie Kohoot, B.A., Hill Top Research site manager.

The study's multi-parametric approach is broad-based, as it collects information from various disciplines, such as sensory evaluations by experts, consumer evaluation/self-assessment questionnaires, clinical assessments and instrument evaluations, Dr. Kaul tells Dermatology Times.

Research parameters

For the study, researchers recruited 42 healthy females, ages 35 to 60 years, with mild to moderate photodamage, and instructed them to use an antioxidant-rich cream once daily for eight weeks. Researchers took standardized digital photographs of subjects at baseline and at follow-up visits scheduled two, four and eight weeks later.

Other measurements that occurred at these visits included clinical visual assessments by a blinded expert evaluator (Ms. Kohoot), subjective assessments and silicon replicas.

The latter were analyzed by an outside laboratory (CuDerm), which helped gauge the product's impact on facial wrinkles, lines and roughness.

Dr. Kaul says other objective methods that one can use to evaluate anti-aging skincare products include bioengineering measurements, such as the following:

Subjective questionnaires asked subjects to evaluate the appearance of parameters including lines, wrinkles and redness using a five-point scale (0=none, 4=extreme).

To achieve greater sensitivity, Ms. Kohoot says she used a nine-point scale (0=none, 8=extreme) to grade parameters such as facial lines, wrinkles, laxity and skin tone.

Regarding wrinkling, subjective evaluations revealed a mean rating of 1.83 at two weeks, 1.72 at four weeks and 1.60 at eight weeks (95 percent confidence interval), Dr. Kaul says.

"In this case," Ms. Kohoot says, "we didn't find a statistically significant difference until week eight (p=0.0144)."

Subjective evaluations of facial lines also reached statistical significance (p=0.0009) at week eight.

By comparison, clinicians' evaluations reached statistical insignificance in the following parameters:

Somewhat surprisingly, investigator-assigned coarse wrinkles scores briefly showed a statistically significant increase versus baseline at week four (p = 0.0024).

Conversely, mean firmness scores from subjective questionnaires declined from 2.07 at week two to 1.87 at week four and 1.83 at week eight.

"These figures reached statistical significance at weeks four and eight," Ms. Kohoot says.

As for fine lines, subjective mean scores were 1.85 at week two, 1.72 at week four and 1.55 at week eight.