"Giant" senile sebaceous hyperplasia

Although the usual size of senile sebaceous hyperplasia is 2 to 3 mm in diameter, we report one "giant" nodular case on the face. The patient is a 75-year-old Japanese man with a dome-shaped, skin-colored nodule on his right cheek. The lesion was 10 mm in diameter and had multiple small umbilications on its surface. He also had several small, yellow-colored, asymptomatic papules with central umbilication on his cheeks. Histologically, the giant nodule and the papule on the right cheek showed the same architectural pattern, a sharply demarcated hyperplasia of grouped mature sebaceous glands with a sebaceous converging duct, whose opening to the surface epithelium corresponded to the clinical umbilication. The reason for the giant growth of this senile sebaceous hyperplasia in our case is obscure; the patient had not been stressed by inductive agents or factors such as systemic corticosteroid and hemodialysis except for electrocoagulation on the lesion. In spite of the extraordinarily large size of the nodule, the conservative proliferating pattern seemed to show the benign hyperplastic character of senile sebaceous hyperplasia.