Five theories about vitiligo causes

What causes vitiligo? There are many sayings about this question. Although the vitiligo pathogenesis still remain unclear at present, we can generally boil down to the five theories about what causes vitiligo at present medical field. In the following part, I’d like to explain it to you in detail.

(1) Neurochemical theory:

Many clinical observation indicates that the nerve factors closely related with the vitiligo onset. According to the survey, there are about 2/3 patients suffer from mental traumas, over tired, too much anxiety during their skin lesion period.

(2) Autoimmunity theory:

In recent years, we observed the patients and their relatives can have other autoimmunity disease. The common autoimmunity diseases includes thyroid disease, diabetes, chronic adrenal deficiency disease, pernicious disease and etc. The patients with these diseases have higher vitiligo onset rate. The isomorphic reaction of vitiligo is quite higher. The isomorphic reaction is a autoimmunity phenomenon. All I mentioned above proved the vitiligo closely related with the auto immune system disorder.

(3) Melanocyte self-destruction theory:

The basic lesion of vitiligo is the melanocyte in the epidermal skin partly or completely lost the function which cause the melanocyte and melanin pigment particles decreased obviously. The intermediate substances in the melanin generalized process is phenol and polyphenols, these substances can inhibit the pigment synthesis. The experiments indicates that the phenol and polyphenols both can damage the melanocyte.

(4) The relatively lack of tyrosine and copper ion theory:

The melanin produce procedure is a quite complex biochemical process. The dopa is both the predecessors of the melanin and adrenal pigment, all it derived from tyrosine and changed from tyrosine. When the patients quite nervous, they will consume large amount of adrenal pigment, in that time, the dopa mainly have the effects of synthesize the adrenal pigment. The melanin synthesis will influenced.

(5) Genetic factor theory:

Some people think vitiligo might is a autosomal skin disease, we already found the vitiligo onset rate in the relatives of vitiligo patients is about 18% to 40%.

Some vitiligo patients can not found out any inducements. Generally speaking, the vitiligo induced by the internal factors and external factors combine together which induce the immune function, endocrine, metabolic function disorder and cause the tyrosinase system inhibit the melanocyte and finally cause the depigmentation phenomenon.