Cutaneous Spitzoid melanoma in a very young girl of Asian descent.
Cutaneous melanoma is extremely uncommon in children. Further, Asian-Americans appear to be at decreased risk for cutaneous melanoma. The authors present the case of a prepubescent Asian girl who presents with the rare spitzoid variant of cutaneous melanoma. The patient is a 4-year-old girl of Chinese descent who presented with a red, raised nodule, which increased in size over a 3-month period. She underwent wide local excision with sentinel lymph node dissection. On histopathologic analysis, she was found to have Spitzoid melanoma of childhood/adolescence. Spitzoid melanoma in children is rare and incompletely understood. A recent systematic review was only able to identify 82 such cases published over a 57-year period. To our knowledge, this is the first report of Spitzoid melanoma in a paediatric age patient of Asian descent. While this clearly is an uncommon demographic, it seeks to highlight important differences in racial predilection for Spitzoid melanoma.
Department of Surgery, University of California at San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA. suzette.miranda@ucsfmedctr.org
Suzette G
SG
Miranda
Mohammed
M
Kashani-Sabet
Daniel
D
Zedek
Timothy H
TH
McCalmont
Stanley P L
SP
Leong
D001213:Asian; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007866:Leg; D008545:Melanoma / Q000473:pathology*; D012878:Skin Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*