Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Definition
By Mayo Clinic staff
Vitiligo (vit-ih-LI-go) is a condition in which your skin loses melanin, the pigment that determines the color of your skin, hair and eyes. Vitiligo occurs when the cells that produce melanin die or no longer form melanin, causing slowly enlarging white patches of irregular shapes to appear on your skin.
Vitiligo affects all races, but may be more noticeable and disfiguring in people with darker skin. Vitiligo usually starts as small areas of pigment loss that spread with time. These changes in your skin can result in stress and worries about your appearance.
There is no cure for vitiligo. The goal of treatment is to stop or slow the progression of pigment loss and, if you desire, attempt to return some color to your skin.
- Halder RM, et al. Vitiligo. In: Wolff K, et al. Fitzpatrick's Dermatology in General Medicine. 7th ed. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Professional; 2007. http://www.accessmedicine.com/content.aspx?aID=2972969&searchStr=vitiligo. Accessed March 2, 2009.
- Vitiligo. American Academy of Dermatology. http://www.aad.org/public/publications/pamphlets/common_vitilgo.html. Accessed March 5, 2009.
- Questions and answers about vitiligo. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. http://www.niams.nih.gov/Health_Info/Vitiligo/default.asp. Accessed March 2, 2009.
- Goldstein BG, et al. Vitiligo. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed March 4, 2009.
- Faas L, et al. In vivo evaluation of piperine and synthetic analogues as potential treatments for vitiligo using a sparsely pigmented mouse model. British Journal of Dermatology. 2008;158:941.
- Whitton ME, et al. Therapeutic interventions for vitiligo. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 2008;59:713.
- Parsad D, et al. Effectiveness of oral Ginkgo biloba in treating limited, slowly spreading vitiligo. Clinical Experimental Dermatology. 2003;28:285.
- Gibson LE (expert opinion). Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. March 17, 2009.
- Lotti T, et al. Vitiligo: New and emerging treatments. Dermatologic Therapy. 2008; 21:110.
