The clinical characteristics and the frequency of metastatic cutaneous tumors among primary skin tumors

Background and Design: Our aim was to find out the ratio of cutaneous metastatic tumors among all cutaneous and skin appendage tumors and to establish their clinical characteriaMaterial-methods: We scanned the histopathological diagnoses of all the skin tumors records from the archives between 2006 to 2012 and recorded the age, gender, the diagnosis of internal malignancy, the type of cutenous lesion, the location and the period between the appearance of the primary malignancies and cutaneous metastases.Results: We found that 20 (0,48%) out of 4126 skin tumors were diagnosed as cutaneous metastatic tumors. Ten of the patients were men and ten of them were women ( median age of 51,3±18,34). When considered primary internal malignancies of these patients 6 patients with gastroenterologic malignancy, 4 patients with lung cancer, 4 patients with breast cancer, 3 patients with malignant melanoma, 1 patient with Ewing sarcoma, 1 with acute myeloblastic leukemia and 1 with prostatic cancer were diagnosed. The clinical appearance of the tumors were as follows; 14 nodule, 2 eczematized plaque, 2 papule, 1 papulonodule, 1 infitrated plaque. The localizations of the cutaneous metastatic tumors were as follows; 7 lesions on the anterior trunk, 5 lesions on the abdominal wall, 2 lesions on the back, 2 lesions on the thigh, 2 lesions on the scalp, 1 on the anterior arm, 1 on the inguinal site. We found that 3 patients (15 % ) attended with cutaneous metastatic tumors before the diagnosis of internal malignancies while 17 patients (85 %) attended 18,97±24,76 months (1,5 -109 months) after the diagnosis of internal malignancies.Conclusion: Cutaneous metastatic tumors are rarely seen skin lesions. We found that cutaneous metastatic tumors are mostly nodular and with trunk localization. It is important to recogniza these tumors, because they address primary internal tumo