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Volume 10 Supplement 1

de Senectute: Age and Health Forum

Epidemiologic and clinical study of skin cancer in the insular regions of Italy

Background

Skin tumors, including Epithelial tumors, Adnexal tumors, Merkel carcinoma and Melanoma, are a prominent disease of advanced age, with a frequency of 40 cases /year for 100,000 people and a mortality of 1% [1].

Ethiopatogenesis is correlated with external factors, above all UV exposition, and skin and adnexal phenotypes; for this reason people from the regions of insular Italy are more at risk from this pathological state.

Materials and methods

This study is an analysis of skin tumors that have been treated in the last 10 years in our Department of Plastic Surgery. We have considered the age incidence, sex incidence, localization and histotype.

Results

From the elaboration of data it emerged that male patients, within an age range of 60 to 80 years old, are the most affected by this disease.

The most frequent locations that present these conditions are the cervical-facial region, followed by the trunk/thorax, upper limbs and lower limbs.

Epithelial tumors, basal cell Carcinoma and squamous cell Carcinoma, have a much higher incidence than adnexal Carcinoma and Merkel carcinoma: particularly the basal cell Ca which has an incidence of 72%, Squamous cell Ca represents 18% of epithelial tumors, adnexal Ca are about 1.5% and Merkel Ca has an even lower incidence.

Finally, we cannot neglect melanomas, sarcomas and cutaneous linfomas which have an incidence of 6%.

Conclusions

The analysis of these data has emphasized the high morbidity of this disease which more often than not reaches the specialist at a very advanced stage.

The objective of this study is to highlight the high incidence of this disease in the regions of insular Italy and the clinical and social implications, in order to bring about an effective plan of prevention, [2–4].

References

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  4. Khaled A, Ben MbareK L, et al: Epidemiologic study of cutaneous cancers in aged persons.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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d’Alcontres, F.S., Scarcella, M.C., Manasseri, B. et al. Epidemiologic and clinical study of skin cancer in the insular regions of Italy. BMC Geriatr 10 (Suppl 1), A80 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2318-10-S1-A80

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2318-10-S1-A80

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