all dermatology stories

Body art for the faint of heart

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:46:35 -0400

Ever wish you could get rid of that tattoo of barbed wire around your wrist, or the forearm-length dragon you once thought of as so stylish or macho?

It's not easy. You can go through a long, expensive series of laser treatments, and still not get it completely erased. You can have it sanded off, literally, but that could leave a scar.

Urine test may help monitor disfiguring birthmarks

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:20:45 -0400

Vascular anomalies include both vascular malformations and vascular tumors (most commonly hemangiomas). Hemangiomas, found in about 10 percent of infants, occur when the cells lining blood vessels multiply abnormally. Hemangiomas grow rapidly in the first year of life, then usually shrink and disappear. But some grow large, causing obstruction, ulceration, and other problems. Vascular malformations occur during fetal development, usually growing in proportion to the child, but sometimes progress during adolescence or pregnancy, or after surgery or trauma, in rare instances becoming fatal.

Urine test tracks deadly birthmarks

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:20:52 -0400

Although not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, results from simple urine tests are already being used to guide treatment of children with disfiguring birthmarks and adults with cancer. Urine tests, now given to all people as part of every physical, might someday provide doctors with valuable information difficult to obtain by other means.

"Many birthmarks, caused by abnormal growth of blood or lymphatic vessels, go away without treatment," notes Marsha Moses, associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston. "But some grow frightfully big before they start to regress - big enough to kill a child. Also, some birthmarks grow unseen, inside the body. We can look at the urine of these children and predict the extent and activity of the abnormalities. Such a capability gives physicians data they can use to treat these patients more effectively."

The same is true for cancer. Last year, Moses and her colleagues announced discovery of ADAM 12, a protein found in the urine of breast cancer patients. Increasing amounts of this protein in urine signal that the cancer is getting worse.

Study sheds light on how the sun causes skin cancer

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:28:41 -0400

Scientists have discovered that the sun's damaging ultraviolet (UV) rays target a series of biochemical signals inside the young skin cell, impairing the cell's ability to control its proliferation. Lynda Chin and her colleagues found that they could increase both the number of tumors and the speed with which they formed by exposing newborn mice with an intact Rb pathway to UV radiation. (A pathway is a chain of biochemical signals that regulates cellular activity.) Those mice in which the Rb pathway was already essentially knocked out were unaffected by the dose of UV radiation.

New treatment effective against psoriasis

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:07:50 -0400

Psoriasis is a skin disease that disfigures people's bodies with scaly red plaques. Thirteen patients had portions of their psoriasis patches irradiated with intense beams of ultraviolet laser light at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other parts of the plaques were left untreated for comparison. After only five treatments, one patient's redness, scales, and discomfort disappeared from the irradiated areas. Other patients required only a single treatment, lasting a few minutes, to clear their skin. In all cases, the treated areas remained clear for more than six months. Researcher Charles Taylor feels sure ultraviolet lasers will be adapted to treat other common skin maladies that distress millions of people in the United States. These include eczema, chronic itching, sun poisoning, vitiligo, and purple, lichen-looking markings known as lichen planus. Vitiligo produces a loss of pigment, resulting in splotches of light skin on dark-skinned individuals.

Hypersensitive skin reveals clues about migraine pains

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:08:21 -0400

Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center documented extreme skin sensitivity in 79 percent of migraine sufferers who were tested several hours after their headache pain began. The other 21 percent of people with migraines showed no increase in skin sensitivity. "Patients tell us they can't brush their hair, wear earrings or eyeglasses, or shave their beards because it's so painful," says Rami Burstein, a pain researcher in the Beth Israel Deaconess anesthesiology department. "The immediate implication of this finding, and the understanding of the neuronal mechanism behind it, is that patients need to treat their migraines as soon as the pain starts." Burstein is also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Migraines affect an estimated 25 million Americans, mostly women. There is no known cure for migraine disease, only treatments for the symptoms, and the treatments are ineffective in many cases. The new findings may explaine why current medications are ineffective in many cases and suggest a new target for the next generation of migraine drugs.