2023-07-14 12:27:34
It’s wonderful when the sun breaks down, isn’t it? Anyone who has the opportunity to cool off, whether on holiday in the sea or in the water features of a city park, can hardly get enough of it – and it is almost impossible to imagine that we also have to fear this glorious sun to an extreme degree. Fear more than we all like. Sure, none of us can and wants to hole up in dark caves. We need sunlight so that our body builds up the “bone vitamin” D. But if you are outside for hours without protection, you have to expect that the sun will show its second, its horrible face. Not suddenly, like a monster, but rather cruelly and slowly we are flambéed: our skin burns.
Joachim Müller-Jung
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the “Nature and Science” department.
Sunburn in young people is a serious radiation accident if it strikes more than about six times before adulthood. A large proportion of skin cancer cases in older adults came about in the same way: because they had unprotected barbecues in the sun as children. How exactly this can happen was not clear for a long time, although a lot of research is being done on the skin. However, some rumors that are still circulating are definitely wrong: In order to get a nice tan so that the skin produces the pigment melanin, you certainly don’t have to have been sunburned. If you want to deliberately get your body’s melanin production going, you have to dose the sun’s rays extremely carefully, generously with sunscreen creams with a high sun protection factor (preferably fifty) and with frequent breaks in the sun.
Our column “How do I explain it to my child?”: Image: FAZ
The sun protection should not shield the sunlight, but only that part of the solar radiation that we cannot see with our eyes: the ultraviolet rays, in short: UV rays. You are extremely energetic. And they are the actual triggers for sunburn. Unlike visible light, they penetrate deep into the skin. There, in the epidermis, the UV light waves strike like a shower of meteorites: They punch holes in the genetic material, the DNA, so they hack up our genetic program and, in the worst case, cause a kind of software error in the skin cells.
Usually these programming errors are repaired. Evolution set us up for it. However, at some point our repair shop is overwhelmed. Many skin cells die, but some survive, and such DNA errors accumulate in these for a lifetime – until the gene program crashes at some point with further errors and the affected cell begins to proliferate indiscriminately. Cancer!
Lucia Schmidt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 109 Anna-Lena Niemann Published/Updated: Recommendations: 46 Ulf von Rauchhaupt Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 19
Sunburn is the visible expression that the skin is defending itself: inflammation is triggered in the subcutaneous tissue. Lots of new, beneficial molecules are being produced to dilate the smallest blood vessels in the skin, providing an expressway for repair molecules. The decisive factor for this, and this has only been known for a short time, is that the UV rays also destroy snippets of ribonucleic acids (RNA). These tiny relatives of our genetic material DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) control our genes. When they are chopped up en masse by ultraviolet rays, like DNA, they apparently activate harmful genes. And more and more, the more sunburns occur, which later convert the surviving skin cells into cancer cells.
The sunburn itself is not the real danger. It also usually heals after a few days as dead cells slough off the surface. The digital conflagration in the genome, which is invisible to us in the skin, is really dangerous. The sunburn is just the red lamp and painful siren, our fire alarm built into the skin. It indicates when the sun is hacking away at our genetic code. So anyone who avoids sunburn is a modern hero, and even a double one: firefighters and data protection officers in their own right.
Even more answers to curious children’s questions
An illustrated selection of articles from our column “How do I explain it to my child?” has been published by Reclam.
#worst #reddening #skin