A 56-year-old woman began to describe to me anxiously when she first entered the consultation room, that she had started to lose pigmentation on the back of her hands 2 months ago, initially only a small patch of porcelain white, but later on the back of her feet, lower lip, and even her nostrils were slowly becoming depigmented. After taking a detailed medical history, I noticed a scar on her neck and asked her what kind of surgery she had undergone. She said she had undergone surgery 27 years ago for hyperthyroidism, but did not have her entire thyroid gland cut out. The first thing that I did was to ask her about the surgery she had undergone 27 years ago for hyperthyroidism, but she did not have all of her thyroid removed. Furthermore, she said that her parents had died one after another in the last two months and she was in a bad mood and was sad and in tears because of it. I diagnosed Wang’s disease as vitiligo, and considering that she still has residual thyroid, I did a full thyroid workup for her. After analyzing Wang’s condition, in addition to topical medication, I advised her to relax, bad mood and persistent thyroid problems may make the topical medication not achieve the expected treatment effect.
So what kind of disease is vitiligo?
Vitiligo is a common skin mucous membrane pigment loss disease, any part can occur. The actual fact is that you can find a lot of people who are not able to get a good deal on a lot of things. Some autoantibodies such as thyroglobulin antibodies, peroxidase antibodies, anti-gastric lining cell antibodies, etc. can be found in the serum of patients during laboratory tests. The actual fact that some of the vitiligo patients’ lesions occur at the site of deepening pigmentation may be related to the hyperfunction of melanocytes to promote their depletion and decline. The genetic factors of vitiligo, the patient’s family can have more than one person with the disease.
There are many vitiligo treatment methods, first of all, to determine the cause of vitiligo, based on which you can choose topical drug treatment, 308 excimer laser treatment, narrow-wave ultraviolet therapy, photochemotherapy and surgical epidermal transplantation. According to the condition to choose the appropriate method or comprehensive treatment, early and sufficient amount of treatment can achieve significant results.