Clinical study of patients with hand eczema accompanied by nail dystrophy

摘要

Dear Editor, Hand eczema is a disease frequently observed in dermatologi-cal practice, and is sometimes accompanied by nail changes. However, not many studies have been performed on nail dystrophy in hand eczema patients. This study aims to describe the morphological features of nail dystrophy in hand eczema patients and to investigate the association between the prevalence of nail dystrophy and hand eczema severity. From 2010 to 2011, we investigated 124 patients who were referred to the Eulji Hospital and who had hand eczema. Information about the patients' age, sex, jobs and disease duration was obtained. Thorough nail examination included providing a description with morphological features of the nail dystrophy and the involvement of hand eczema in the fingertip area, checking for the presence of paronychia. The severity of hand eczema was assessed using the HECSI scoring system described by Held et al. in 2005.Patients were classified into two groups: (i) nail dystrophy; and (ii) non-nail dystrophy . A Mann-Whitney l/-test and %-test were used and statistical analyses were performed using SPSS ver. 14.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA). P < 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant.