Malignant melanoma arising from cutaneous bronchogenic cyst of the scapular area.

Bronchogenic cyst, an uncommon developmental anomaly that originates from the primitive tracheobronchial tree, is rare in the skin. The shoulder region is a particularly rare location. We report a 46-year-old Japanese man with recurrent malignant melanoma that arose from such a cutaneous bronchogenic cyst in the left scapular area.

Functional and morphological studies of photodamaged skin on the hands of middle-aged Japanese golfers.

The skin of golfers' hands provides a suitable model to study the effect of chronic sun exposure, because one of their hands is exposed to the outer environment, especially sunlight, while the other one is always protected by a glove during play. Our purpose was to find out the influence of photodamage on the properties of the skin surface of middle-aged Japanese by using non-invasive methods. We measured hydration state, and water barrier function of the stratum corneum (SC) and the color of the skin of the dorsum of the hands.

Irritancy of scrubbing up for surgery with or without a brush.

Hand washing is an indispensable procedure for surgical nurses. Although scrubbing up with a brush is preferable to prevent infections, it is not clear how irritating to the skin scrubbing with a brush is compared with hand washing without a brush. TEWL, high frequency conductance and pH were measured on the hand skin of the same group of nurses before and after daily hand washing for 11 days in different seasons, which were chosen as favourable and unfavourable periods for the condition of hand skin, namely the early summer and autumn.

Successful treatment of a therapy-resistant severely pruritic skin eruption of malignancy-associated dermatomyositis with high-dose intravenous immunoglobulin.

Malignancy-associated dermatomyositis developing in a middle-aged Japanese female was successfully treated by removal of her gastric cancer. However, five years later, concomitant with catching a cold, her severely pruritic skin lesions recurred on exposed areas. Six years after the start of corticosteroid therapy for her annoying skin lesion, we started to treat her with high-dose intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusion therapy because of the difficulty of reducing the dosage of oral prednisone, that had secondarily induced adverse effects.