Ozone and ozonated oils in skin diseases: a review

Although orthodox medicine has provided a variety of topical anti-infective agents, some of them have become scarcely effective owing to antibiotic- and chemotherapeutic-resistant pathogens. For more than a century, ozone has been known to be an excellent disinfectant that nevertheless had to be used with caution for its oxidizing properties. Only during the last decade it has been learned how to tame its great reactivity by precisely dosing its concentration and permanently incorporating the gas into triglycerides where gaseous ozone chemically reacts with unsaturated substrates leading to therapeutically active ozonated derivatives. Today the stability and efficacy of the ozonated oils have been already demonstrated, but owing to a plethora of commercial products, the present paper aims to analyze these derivatives suggesting the strategy to obtain products with the best characteristics.