The spectrum of cutaneous disease in leukemias

Abstract

Cutaneous eruptions are frequent complications in the clinical course of patients with leukemia. Leukemia cutis is occasionally the cause of the eruption, but in many cases the lesions are nonleukemic. We have retrospectively selected all skin biopsies from patients with a computer-coded diagnosis of leukemia seen in the Stanford University Department of Pathology in the last 7 years, and separated these cases into the broad categories of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). We also analyzed separately those cases seen in patients treated with bone marrow transplantation from those treated with standard chemotherapy regimens. We found that leukemia cutis was seen frequently as the cause of lesions in patients with CML and CLL. In contrast, a wide variety of lesions were seen in patients with AML, including a greater number of infectious lesions, drug reactions, vasculitis, and lesions secondary to a hemorrhagic diathesis. In the bone marrow transplantation patients, graft vs host disease was usually the cause of skin lesions in those transplanted for CML and ALL, but again those patients with an underlying diagnosis of AML showed a wide variety of lesions including drug reactions, fungal infections and leukemia cutis. Finally, 6% of cases from patients with AML showed intraepidermal blistering disorders of various types, an association that has not been previously reported.