Techniques for assessing the vulnerability and repair capacity of human skin in vivo

Techniques have been developed for studying age-associated changes in human skin, including its vulnerability to external insults and its capacity for healing. Possible application of these methods for studying the effects of repeated mechanical trauma to the skin of workers is discussed. The methods include procedures for inflicting standardized superficial wounds and nonintrusive techniques for measuring damage, rate of skin repair via measurement of transepidermal water loss, and characterization of altered surface features using image analyses. These approaches have the great advantage of allowing quantification.