This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (2)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Dermatology, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

A New Entity

Margarita Larralde, MD, PhD; María Eugenia Abad, MD; Andrea Santos Muñoz, MD; Paula Luna, MD

Arch Dermatol. 2007;143(7):909-911.

Background  Comedones are usually found in acne and involve the seborrheic areas of the skin. Disseminated comedones can be found in other skin disorders. Flexural comedones are characterized by double orifices connected by a thin layer of epidermis that reveals the comedo content below it. To the best of our knowledge, flexural comedones have not been previously described as an entity. Our objective was to characterize this disorder.

Observations  A cross-sectional descriptive study was performed from April 2004 to July 2006. We included 40 pediatric and adolescent patients with flexural comedones; 21 were female (52%), and 19 were male (48%) (mean age, 6.2 years). In 29 cases the lesions were single (72%) and in 32 cases (80%) unilateral. The lesions were located in the axilla in 88% of the patients. We performed biopsies of skin samples in 6 cases.

Conclusions  To our knowledge, flexural comedones have not been previously described as an entity, and we felt that they deserved attention owing to the relative frequency of cases in our clinical practice. Because of its clinical appearance, flexural localization, and age distribution, we named this disorder childhood flexural comedones. Further investigation and follow-up of a larger number of patients is needed.

Author Affiliations: Departments of Dermatology, Alemán Hospital (Drs Larralde and Santos Muñoz), Ramos Mejía Hospital (Drs Larralde and Abad), and Churruca-Visca Hospital (Dr Luna), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?