A 30-year-old woman presented to our hospital in Manacor, Mallorca, with a new lesion on the thorax that had appeared three to four months earlier, had gradually enlarged and was slightly itchy. The patient was otherwise healthy. Physical examination revealed a tender, brownish papule or plaque contacting the elastic band of the underwear under the right breast (Figure 1). The remaining physica...

The development of allergic inflammation requires the orchestration of gene expression from the inflamed tissue and from the infiltrating immune cells. Since many of the cytokines that promote allergic inflammation signal through hematopoietin family receptors, the Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription (STAT) family have obligate roles in pro-allergic cytokine-induced gene regulation...

It has been wondered why we can discriminate between itching and pain as different sensations. Several researchers have investigated neural mechanisms underlying their perceptual differences, and found that some C fibers and spinothalamic tract neurons had different sensitivity between itching and pain. These findings suggest that such differences in ascending pathways are partly associated wit...

introduction: henoch schonlein purpura (hsp) is a self-limited systemic disease with multiorgan involvement. while cutaneous involvement may wary, presenting as itching papules is not a common manifestation. in this report we discuss a case of hsp which was presented solely with itching papules; mistaken for scabies. case presentation: a 7 year old boy presented with itchy palpable papules with...

The itch sensation results from the excitation of primary sensory nerve endings in the skin, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are not completely understood. Liu et al. (2009) now report that some members of the Mrgpr class of G protein-coupled receptors mediate the itch caused by the antimalarial drug chloroquine.

Electrically evoked itching has the strong potential to be used to investigate the central processing associated with itching at high temporal resolution by employing magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography (EEG), and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, it has not been investigated whether time-locked brain activity can be measured using this stimulus, and wheth...