Dermotoscope assisted diagnosis of adolescent bullous pilomatricoma: six case reports

Abstract

Background Pilomatricoma (PM) is a cutaneous benign neoplasm derived from the hair matrix. It clinically presents as a solitary and firm nodule overlying normal epidermis and is usually not easy to be noticed at early stage. Nevertheless, when special bullous lesion occurs in a short time or even ulcerates, preoperative diagnosis by a dermatologist is often challenging especially when the pediatric patients refuse biopsy. Case presentation We present six bullous PM cases and particularly conduct correlation analysis on the dermotoscopy and histopathology detection data. The basic information, medical history, symptoms and lesion morphology results of the patients were also provided. We found that the incidence of bullous PM was higher in females than in males, and most patients were adolescents and the predilection location seem to be consistent in the vaccine injection site. The dermatoscopic features of bullous PM reported were luminous yellow structure below, with gray-blue homogeneous areas and branched capillary. The histological features were consistent with PM, and evident epidermis bullae were above the tumor with extraordinary dilation of lymphangion in the upper dermis. The patients described in this study were Chinese patients in Han population included 4 females and 2 males, coincidentally, they are almost teen-age, respectively are 5,11,17,19,21,22 year-old. Conclusions This study reported and analyzed the dermotoscopy and clinical characteristics of bullous PM, dermotoscopy may guide as a rapid and reliable technique in bullous PM diagnosis.