[Extramedullary primary cutaneous plasmacytoma. Description of a case]

Primary cutaneous plasmacytomas of the chest wall are very rare. In this report we describe a case of a 70-years old man, affected by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and renal failure. He was admitted because of a painful tumor on the right lateral chest wall: a transcutaneous fine needle aspiration and excisional biopsy revealed as a metastasis from lung cancer without clinical and or radiological evidence of pulmonary tumors and or other neoplasms. Because of failure of chemotherapy, the patient had undergone to bone marrow biopsy that it revealed medullary plasmacytosis < 5% plasma cells with a beta 2 microglobulin elevated. An other following excisional biopsy of a chest wall with immunocytochemistry revealed to be a cutaneous plasmacytomas. The patient was treated with local irradiation for a total dose of 40 cGy and systemic chemotherapy, stopped because of death by myocardial infarction. Cutaneous plasmacytomas appear to be more aggressive than non cutaneous extramedullary plasmacytomas; they should be separately categorized from them in future studies.