A group of scientists working for the University of Illinois have discovered that a certain omega-6 fatty acid might be integral to maintaining the overall health of your skin. This study was published in the Journal of Lipid Research. The funding for the study was provided by a grant from the National Institutes of Health and the USDA National Needs Fellowship Awards. According to Manaby Nakamura, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition, experiments conducted with mice revealed that there is a gene which is responsible for creating an enzyme that helps the body to produce arachidonic acid. Without the presence of arachidonic acid, the mice ended up developing severe ulcerative dermatitis. They scratched themselves continuously and also developed bleeding sores.

When this acid was added to the animal’s diet, the itching went away. The scientists then tried to focus their energies on trying to understand the functions of the omega-3 fatty acid and the omega-6 fatty acid with the help of a mouse model that was designed to determine the physiological roles played by these fatty acids. It was learned that knocking out the genes allowed the researchers to create certain fat deficiencies and learn more about the functions of these fats. Nakamura states that knocking out the gene which allowed the body to create the delta-6-desaturase enzyme was very beneficial because it helped the researchers to make a number of exciting discoveries. They learned that arachidonic acid was essential for the healthy functioning of the skin. This discovery might have widespread implications in treatments of itchy and flaky skin that can also occur without any specific cause in infants.

He explained that the human body makes arachidonic acid from an essential fatty acid known as linoleic acid. Linoleic acid is usually obtained through one’s diet and is mostly found in vegetable oils. Previous studies have already termed linoleic acid as integral for healthy skin because it offered the skin with lipids that were responsible for coating the outer layer of the skin and preventing the loss of energy and water from the body.

However, skin functions are not as simple. The itchy mice had more than enough linoleic acid in their body. The problem was that their body couldn’t convert this acid into arachidonic acid because the gene that was responsible for creating the enzyme had been knocked out.

Arachidonic acid is considered to be very important for the production of a group of compounds that cause inflammatory reactions which are integral to the immune functions of the body. These compounds are known as prostaglandins. In fact, many painkillers like ibuprofen and aspirin work by preventing the conversion of arachidonic acid into prostaglandins.

Most people usually associate inflammation with something that causes damage to the body, but prostaglandins actually help in preventing dermatitis. The group of experts also measured the level of prostaglandin in the skin of the animals and discovered that when the knocked out mice were fed with arachidonic acid, their bodies resumed making prostaglandins.

There are things that related to the functions of this omega-6 fatty acid that still need to be determined. Since this is a new discovery and a starting point, more research is required at the cellular level to determine exactly how this acid functions and what other systems it affects.