Successful Treatment in a Child with Refractory Periungual Warts by Local Hyperthermia: A Case Report

Abstract

Periungual wart is a kind of verruca vulgaris that occurs alongside or underlying the nails, which is challenging to treat and prone to recurrence, seriously affecting the quality of patients’ life. We report a 6-year-old boy with periungual warts who had experienced various treatments with no improvement and even worsening. Therefore, we tried to treat the patient with local hyperthermia which uses a patented device that has an infrared emission source. The heat generated by infrared rays acts on the local skin surface. The mechanism of this therapy may be to establish a specific immune response against human papillomavirus-infected tissues, thereby facilitating the clearance of human papillomavirus at irradiated and non-irradiated sites. Local hyperthermia has the advantages of non-contact, safety, noninvasive, less pain, and so on. After 5 treatments, the irradiated periungual warts completely cleared after 2 weeks. The unirradiated sites were almost cured after 7 weeks. This case suggests that local thermotherapy has shown great advantages in the treatment of these refractory periungual warts and offers a new and effective therapy in patients with periungual warts.

Successful Treatment of Multiple Plantar and Periungual Warts by Local Hyperthermia Treatment: A Case Report

“…10 Currently, studies on the application of hyperthermia treatment to HPV-infected diseases mainly concentrate on the treatment of flat warts, condyloma acuminata and plantar warts, and there are also case descriptions of successful treatment of periungual warts with local hyperthermia treatment. 11,12 However, our patient had a combination of both multiple plantar and periungual warts, involving multiple areas of the hands and feet. Besides, the patient showed no response to conventional treatment due to the large therapeutic range and many treatment sites.…”