Superficial phaeohyphomycosis of the scrotum in a patient with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Tiny keratotic brown lesions on the interdigital web between the toes of a healthy man caused by Curvularia species infection and a review of cutaneous Curvularia infections

“…Mahgoub (1973) described the first report of cutaneous Curvularia infection, caused by C. lunata. Thereafter, 25 reports of human skin infection cases in the English and Japanese literature were published (Mahgoub 1973;Rohwedder et al 1979;Barde and Singh 1983;Kiryu and Suenaga 1985;Duvic et al 1987;Gugnani et al 1990;Kamalam et al 1992;Grieshop et al 1993;Harris and Downham 1978;Lavoie et al 1993;Still et al 1993;Yvonne et al 1994;Agrawal and Singh 1995;Berg et al 1995;Torda and Jones 1997;Lopes and Jobim 1998;Fernandez et al 1999;Bonduel et al 2001;Tessari et al 2003;Tamaki et al 2006;Fan et al 2008;Garg et al 2008;Hiromoto et al 2008), including our patient (Table 2). Five species in the genus Curvularia were isolated from the skin lesions.…”

“…Eight (Harris and Downham 1978;Duvic et al 1987;Grieshop et al 1993;Still et al 1993;Yvonne et al 1994;Torda and Jones 1997;Tessari et al 2003;Garg et al 2008) of 16 cases of deep mycosis and 5 cases (Gugnani et al 1990;Kamalam et al 1992;Agrawal and Singh 1995), including our case, of 7 cases of superficial infection showed pigmented brown to black lesions; 2 cases showed seborrheic keratosis-like lesions (Duvic et al 1987;Torda and Jones 1997). One patient (Torda and Jones 1997) first underwent cryotherapy for the pigmented lesion on the thigh, and the other patient (Duvic et al 1987), with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), demonstrated tiny brown spotty lesions on the scrotum.…”

“…Those lesions were divided into two groups: the deep mycosis type and the superficial infected type. In the deep mycosis type, 16 cases were reported: abscess (mycetomas) (Mahgoub 1973), ulcer (Rohwedder et al 1979;Berg et al 1995, Torda andJones 1997;Hiromoto et al 2008), ecthyma gangrenosum-like lesion (Bonduel et al 2001), firm tender nodules and nodes (Tessari et al 2003;Garg et al 2008), papules (Kiryu and Suenaga 1985;Duvic et al 1987), macular lesion with central necrosis (Fernandez et al 1999), hemorrhagic bullous lesion (Lavoie et al 1993), and others [burn wound (Grieshop et al 1993;Still et al 1993), elevated hyperpigmented scaly lesion (Harris and Downham 1978), and surgical wound (Yvonne et al 1994)]. In the superficial infected type, 7 cases were reported: pigmented macules (Gugnani et al 1990;Agrawal and Singh 1995), scaling lesion (Lopes and Jobim 1998), and brown thick scales (present case) on the web between the toes and onychomycosis (Barde and Singh 1983;Kamalam et al 1992).…”

“…One patient (Torda and Jones 1997) first underwent cryotherapy for the pigmented lesion on the thigh, and the other patient (Duvic et al 1987), with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), demonstrated tiny brown spotty lesions on the scrotum. Some papules resembled small follicular seborrheic keratosis.…”

“…Twelve cases were patients with immunosuppressive conditions such as patients receiving immunosuppressive therapy systemically (Barde and Singh 1983;Berg et al 1995;Tessari et al 2003) or locally (Kiryu and Suenaga 1985), patients (Grieshop et al 1993;Still et al 1993) with severe burn, a neonate (Yvonne et al 1994), a premature baby (Fernandez et al 1999), an overdosage cocaine user (Lavoie et al 1993), a patient (Bonduel et al 2001) with anaplastic anemia undergoing bone marrow transplantation (BMT), a homosexual (Duvic et al 1987) with AIDS, and an immunocompetent man (Fan et al 2008). Three cases (Harris and Downham 1978;Rohwedder et al 1979;Tessari et al 2003) developed dissemination.…”