The appearance of inflammatory papules in the skin surrounding areas treated with imiquimod cream for basal cell carcinoma

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Imiquimod is a topical synthetic immune response modifier recently used for treating basal cell carcinoma. CASE REPORTS: We report the cases of 5 patients treated for basal cell carcinomas on their back with Imiquimod 5% topical cream. Each patient developed numerous inflammatory papules in the skin surrounding the treatment site between two to four weeks after beginning treatment. One of these patients histological exam revealed inflammatory infiltrate predominantly containing lymphocytes and macrophages, but no carcinoma cells. The lesions spontaneously disappeared even though the therapy with Imiquimod was continued. CONCLUSION: We hypothesize that the reactions surrounding the treated area were due to the absorption of the active ingredient that induces an inflammatory response along the lymphatics draining the treatment site

Acute Renal Failure Caused by Imiquimod 5% Cream in a Renal Transplant Patient: Review of the Literature on Side Effects of Imiquimod

“…The most common of those weird systemic side effects are influenza-like symptoms and headache. A review of the literature revealed lots of unusual adverse reactions related to the topical use of this drug, which are summarized in table 1[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57]. …”