Bimatoprost for longer lashes
About a year ago I bought an over-the-counter product which promotes longer, thicker eyelashes (it’s also found in Latisse- which you can get by prescription). I was careful to read the directions on the bottle which also indicated that one may notice darkening of the eyelid near the lash line.
The thought of a discolored eyelid made me take pause, but in the end i went ahead and diligently applied the gel-like substance to my eyelid each night. After about 2 weeks i noticed that my eyelashes were indeed longer and there were more of them, and there was just the slightest hint of darkening at the lash line. But that’s always covered with liner, so not matter.
Putting 2 and 2 together
You would think that with all of my work with vitiligo, the minute I read “may cause darkening of the eyelid” I would have begun applying the substance to my forehead, face, and hands to fill in the white patches of vitiligo, but it just didn’t click. Not until I came across an article online from Skin and Allergy News about Dr. Tarun Narang’s announcement at the World Congress of Dermatology in South Korea in May 2011, that his small pilot study to test if bimatoprost could repigment vitiligo patches was a success.
Here’s a link to that article http://www.skinandallergynews.com/news/medical-dermatology/single-article/bimatoprost-repigments-vitiligo-patient-skin/67821edc35.html
Checking Validity
I want there to be a cure for vitiligo just as much as the next person, but I think it’s very important to find more than one source before I get excited. Off I went on my internet search which yielded quite a bit of useful information.
What is Bimatoprost
First stop: getting the details about bimatoprost. I landed on the U.S. National Library of Medicine site…sounds official enough, right?
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a609009.html
Who else is looking into this vitiligo treatment
Satisfied with an understanding of bimatoprost, the next thought that came to mind is whether or not any other people in the medical community were making this correlation between bimatoprost and vitiligo. A few clicks later I landed on the U.S. National Institutes of Health website which yielded a study done last year; however, the results were not indicated. I did however see that Dr. Tarun Narang is listed as the contact and that the study was to be conducted in India…so that checks out.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01202513?term=bimatoprost+vitiligo&rank=1