A Comparison of Acquired Port-wine Stain with Congenital Port-wine Stain Using an Image Analyzer

Recent reports have proposed that there were no differences between acquired port-wine stain (APWS) and congenital port-wine stain (CPWS) except the onset of disease. Pulsed dye laser (PDL) therapy is regarded as the treatment of choice in PWS. Although in some articles, APWS might have shown a better response to PDL than CPWS, this is still controversial. It has been assumed however, that there might be some differences determining therapeutic responses between the two entities.

The purpose of this study is to find out some histopathologic differences between APWS and CPWS.

14 patients with APWS and 17 patients with CPWS from our patient files were included in this study. Immunohistochemical staining by factor VIII-related antigen was carried out on the specimens of punch biopsy to better visualize the blood vessels. Histopathologic assessment of variables such as vessel area, percentage of vascular area and vessel depth was performed using a computer-assisted image analyzer program.

The mean vessel area in APWS was 1014.7 ± 782.5µm(2) and that of CPWS was 1341.5 ± 689.9µm(2). The mean percentage of vascular area in APWS was 2.02 ± 1.38% and that of CPWS was 2.65 ± 1.56%. The mean vessel depth in APWS was 327.5 ± 120.7µm and 321.7 ± 93.1µm in CPWS. No histopathologic variable was statistically significant using the Mann-Whitney test (p>0.05).