[Pachydermoperiostosis (idiopathic hypertrophic osteoarthropathy)].

Introduction Pachydermoperiostosis is a syndrome characterized by finger clubbing, periosteal new bone formation especially over the distal ends of long bones, and coarsening of the facial features, with thickening, furrowing and oiliness of the skin of the face and forehead. The first reported cases were the Hagner brothers, who had typical features of this syndrome. They were first described by Friedreich (1868), and later by Erb (1887) and Virchow (1889), who diagnosed the condition as acromegaly. It was only 45 years ago that pachydermoperiostosis was first recognized as a distinct entity by Touraine, Solente and Gole (1935), and thus frequently referred to as 'Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome'. It has since been reported from Europeans, Japanese (Ota, 1931), African Negroes (Findlay and Oosthuizen, 1951), American Negroes (Vogl and Goldfischer, 1962), Hindus (Carruthers, 1943) and South American Indians (Marroquin, 1941) but as far as the present authors are aware, only one case has been reported from a Chinese (Leong, Ng and Tay, 1976). They now report details of a second Chinese patient, the first such patient to be described from Hong Kong.