A Study on Appendageal skin tumors in tertiary health centre

Cutaneous appendageal tumors are a large diverse group of tumors that are commonly classified according to their state of appendageal differentiationeccrine, apocrine, follicular and sebaceous. Most appendageal tumors are relatively uncommonly encountered in routine clinical practice. Though some of the appendageal tumors (e.g. syringoma, nevus sebaceous) can be diagnosed clinically with ease but most of them have non-specific morphological appearance and their diagnosis is mainly based on histopathological characteristics. It was a cross sectional descriptive study conducted with a total of 45 patients attending department of dermatology were screened out for appendageal tumors and those (30 patients/66.6%) who were confirmed by histopathological examination of lesional biopsy were included in the study. On the basis of differentiation of tumors, sweat gland tumors were the most common appendageal tumors in our study (79.8%) followed by follicular tumors (11.6%), sebaceous were 8.3%. On individual tumor basis, syringoma constituted maximum numbers of cases (56.6%) followed by multiple trichoepitheliomas and hidrocystoma (both 11.6%). Face was the commonest site of predilection 40(66.6%) followed by scalp 12(20%). Appendageal tumors are relatively uncommon and constitute very small proportion of dermatological disorders. Though clinical appearance might help in diagnosing common appendageal tumors but histological examination remains the gold standard method in diagnosing clinically suspicious lesions.