Naevus of Ota.

THE naevus of Ota is characterized by benign mesodermal melanosis of the skin of the face with pigmentation of the eye and its adnexa. It is probably more familiar to the dermatologists. Pusey (1916) was the first to describe the association of scleral and facial pigmentation in a young Chinese student. Later, in Japan, Ota and Tanino (1939) reported, under the name of naevus fusco-caeruleus maxillo-facialis, a case of "pigmented naevus" occurring in the skin areas supplied by the ophthalmic and maxillary divisions of the trigeminal nerve which was associated with the pigmentation of the eye. Jensen and Haffly (1948) also reported the occurrence of ocular and dermal melanosis in a 47-year-old Chinese man wand suggested that oculo-cutaneous melanosis was a more descriptive term for this entity. Fitzpatrick, Zeller, Kukita, and Kitamura (1956) and Cowan and Balistocky (1961) preferred the term oculodermal melanocytosis. This syndrome of oculo-cutaneous pigmentation has subsequently been reported in the dermatological literature as the naevus of Ota. We report here a further two cases.