FRIDAY, Oct. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Lesions clinically diagnosed as actinic keratoses agree with histopathology in more than 90 percent of cases, although histology shows that about one in 25 cases are squamous cell carcinoma, according to a study in the October issue of Dermatologic Surgery.
Syd Dromgoole, Ph.D., from Therapeutics Inc. in San Diego, and colleagues compared the agreement between the histopathology of actinic keratoses lesions and clinical diagnosis in 220 clinically diagnosed untreated lesions and 51 lesions unresponsive to treatment.
The researchers found that the diagnoses agreed in 91 percent of the 271 cases. The remaining 9 percent were nearly equally divided between benign changes and occult cutaneous malignancy (squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas).
"In this study, about one in 25 clinically diagnosed actinic keratoses lesions identified by board-certified dermatologist investigator(s) were occult early-stage squamous cell carcinomas on histologic assessment, a fact surmised by the medical community that until now had not been well quantified," Dromgoole and colleagues write.
The study was funded by DUSA Pharmaceuticals.
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