The most frequent buccofacial pigmented injuries: Clinical study and histopathological correlation

Abstract

The pigmented injuries of the skin and oral mucosa are alterations that appear commonly at the dental clinic Due to their characteristics and different forms of presentation, their clinical diagnosis usually differs from the morphological study. Taking into consideration the clinical importance of some of these injuries, we proposed ourselves to make a retrospective review of the biopsy archives of the Pathology Department of the Stomatology Faculty from the clinical and morphological point of view during a period of 6 years (1998-2003). The search was directed to those biopsy indications of buccofacial pigmented injuries with their corresponding histopathological report in order to determine some clinical parameters, such as age, sex, localization and the correlation of the clinical histopathological diagnosis. A total of 155 biopsies of patients affected was selected. The results showed that the injuries predominating in the diagnosis were the nevuses (of cutaneous localization), the exogenous pigmentation, the lentigo and the melanoma with a distribution of 65.2 %, 29 %, 4.5 % and 1.3 %, respectively. Females were the most affected in each of the entities. The presentation according to age groups was variable. It was observed that the nevuses and the lentigo were more frequent among the young individuals aged 30-39 (25.7 % and 28.6 %, respectively), whereas the exogenous pigmentations were more common in the oral cavity of patients over 60 (26.7 %). A clinicohistopathological correlation was established and, this way, the clinical diagnosis was confirmed or rectified in every of the studied cases.