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A Japanese case of the fibrillar type of dermatitis herpetiformis
K Shimizu1, T Hashimoto, T Fukuda
1Department of Dermatology, Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan.
Background:
Although dermatitis herpetiformis (DH) is a relatively common disease in Caucasian populations, this disease is very rare in Asian populations including the Japanese.
Methods And Results:
We present a Japanese DH patient, who showed a fibrillar pattern of deposition of IgA, IgG, IgM and C3. The HLA typing revealed no B8/DR3. The survey of the Japanese literature and the comparison to studies on American or European DH revealed several interesting differences: high frequency of the fibrillar pattern, relatively high incidence of deposits of immunoglobulins other than IgA, rarity of gluten-sensitive enteropathy and HLA-B8/DR3 in Japanese DH.
Conclusion:
The present study suggests that there may be a significant difference in pathophysiology between Caucasian and Japanese DH patients.