Histopathological aspects of some rare forms of facial basal cell carcinoma

The main objective of the study was to highlight the histopathological aspects of some rare forms of facial basal cell carcinomas.

The 65 selected patients were diagnosed with head basal cell carcinoma (BCC), during 2011-2013, and they underwent surgery. The excised tumor tissue fragments were processed for paraffin embedding and stained with Hematoxylin-Eosin (HE), Masson's trichrome with Aniline Blue, and Alcian Blue-Periodic Acid Schiff (AB-PAS).

The youngest patient was 23 years old, while the oldest was 91 years. The facial BCC there was slightly higher prevalence in males of 34 out of 65 cases. Histopathologically, great varieties of morphological types have been identified in the 65 cases investigated. According to our data, by far the most common are nodular BCCs type, which represented 44.6% from the investigated cases, followed at some distance by morpheiform and superficial subtypes with 13.8% and 10.7%, respectively. The most rare cases of facial BCCs were: cystic, adenoid, fibroepithelial and basal with adnexal differentiation with in one single case each. Relatively rare were the following varieties: pigmented (four cases), combinations of several forms (four cases), metatypical (three cases), keratotic (three cases), and micronodular (two cases).

Within the limits of this study, the data reported here shown that such a lesional pleomorphism very often requires to make a careful differential diagnosis with a number of other tumor or non-tumor entities.