Association of pain and itch with depth of invasion and inflammatory cell constitution in skin cancer: results of a large clinicopathologic study.

Importance: This study highlights a simple bedside evaluation of itch and pain for suspicious skin lesions.

Objective: To examine the correlation of pain and itch with histologic features of skin cancers.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This large, prospective, clinicopathologic study enrolled patients who filled out questionnaires that assessed itch and pain intensity of their skin tumors at the time of excision.

Composite B-cell and T-cell lineage post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder of the lung with unusual cutaneous manifestations of mycosis fungoides.

We present the case of a 17-year-old male kidney transplant recipient who presented initially with dermatologic symptoms and was found to have histologic changes in the skin that were consistent with mycosis fungoides. Shortly after this diagnosis was made, imaging studies demonstrated multifocal interstitial and airspace consolidation in both lungs. Physical examination revealed no lymphadenopathy or hepatosplenomegaly, but an open lung biopsy revealed an Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-negative monomorphic T-cell posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD) with a concomitant EBV-positive B-cell PTLD involving the same lesion of the lung.

Epidermolysis bullosa pruriginosa masquerading as psychogenic pruritus.

Background: Epidermolysis bullosa pruriginosa is a rare clinical subtype of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa characterized by intense pruritus, secondary scratching-induced lesions, and pronounced scarring.

Observations: We describe a patient with epidermolysis bullosa pruriginosa who was misdiagnosed as having psychogenic pruritus for several years. Except for nail (toenail) dystrophy, no features of the disease were evident among his immediate family members.

The Polycomb group protein Eed protects the inactive X-chromosome from differentiation-induced reactivation.

The Polycomb group (PcG) encodes an evolutionarily conserved set of chromatin-modifying proteins that are thought to maintain cellular transcriptional memory by stably silencing gene expression. In mouse embryos that are mutated for the PcG protein Eed, X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) is not stably maintained in extra-embryonic tissues. Eed is a component of a histone-methyltransferase complex that is thought to contribute to stable silencing in undifferentiated cells due to its enrichment on the inactive X-chromosome in cells of the early mouse embryo and in stem cells of the extra-embryonic trophectoderm lineage.