A Case of Mucinous Nevus Clinically Mimicking Nevus Lipomatosus Superficialis

Vol. 26 No. 4, 2014 549 Received July 26, 2013, Revised September 16, 2013, Accepted for publication September 21, 2013 Corresponding author: Kwang Hyun Cho, Department of Dermatology, Seoul National University Hospital, 101 Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-744, Korea. Tel: 82-2-2072-2412, Fax: 82-2-742-7344, E-mail: [email protected] This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. clinical and histopathological features, we diagnosed all these cases as DNS. Furthermore, we performed excision only in cases of considerable DN that either presented unusual clinicopathological features or where the patient strongly wanted the DN to be removed. For the others, close observation was recommended. Concerning the various definitions, there is considerable debate about the number of DN. Most previous reports agreed that large numbers of DN should be included in the diagnostic criteria. However, Elder et al. described DNS as a wide spectrum of clinical phenotype from a single DN in a patient without a personal and family history of melanoma to familial atypical multiple molemelanoma syndrome. As we have followed Elder’s definitions, we classified even 5 DN as DNS. In analyzing previous cases, all 10 cases could not be analyzed according to asymmetry, border, and color because of a lack of description. However, their size was 3∼45 mm, except in 1 case. Although the DN in 1 patient had a minimum size of 3 mm, as the number of DN was as many as 406, we considered this patient as having DNS. Considering that there are no definite clinicopathological diagnostic criteria of DNS in the West, DNS in Korean patients may be underdiagnosed, as previous Korean reports suggest. In addition, a difference in the number of moles between Asian and Western patients with DNS may encourage changing the diagnostic threshold of DN, and more importantly, DNS.