Association between Facial Skin Tumors and Wrinkling

Abstract

Background: There are many risk factors that accentuate wrinkling like age, sex, occupation and smoking. From our clinical observation we noticed that, patient with skin malignancy are less liable to wrinkling.Objectives: To test the assumption whether skin wrinkling is protective against skin cancer or not? Patients & Methods: A case-control study was conducted in Department of Dermatology and Venereology in Baghdad teaching hospital in period from April 2002 through March 2003 on 54 patients with various skin tumors, and 108 patients as a control group, Socio-demographic information and full dermatological examination was done. Facial wrinkles were examined and measured according to wrinkles score in the group. Then we simplify these score into: superficial, (I, II), medium (III, IV) and deep wrinkles (V, VI). Result: The frequency of skin tumors were as follow; basal cell carcinoma (74.07%), squamous cell carcinoma (11.11%), baso-squamous cell carcinoma, (5.5%) kerato-acanthoma (5.5%) and solar keratosis (3.7%). The commonest age group affected by skin tumors were from 50-79 years and the commonest skin type in cases and controls were skin type III (P>0.05). All skin tumors were more common in males than females (P>0.05). Outdoor activity was more in patients with tumor, while control group had nearly equal outdoor and indoor activity (P<0.05).Patients with superficial wrinkles more commonly affected with skin tumors than those with deep wrinkles, while comparison group had more medium and deep wrinkles. So whenever there was increase in severity of wrinkle, there was decrease in frequency of malignancy. Conclusion: The present work had confirmed a negative association between wrinkling score and the frequency of skin tumors. Smoking might indirectly protect against basal cell carcinoma. Key words: Facial wrinkling, tumors, smoking.