A Clinical Study of Patients with Hand Eczema

Choi, Myoung Soon; Yun, Sook Jung; Lee, Jee Bum; Kim, Seong Jin; Lee, Seung Chul; Won, Young Ho

Abstract

BACKGROUND
Hand eczema is a common dermatosis, yet it is has diverse etiologic factors and clinical manifestations, and it is usually recalcitrant to treatment. There are only infrequent population-based clinical and epidemiological studies on hand eczemain the medical literature.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical manifestations and influences of occupation, concomitant allergic diseases, various aggravating factors and seasonal changes for patients with hand eczema. In addition, we tried to categorize the patients with hand eczema by the morphological characteristics.
METHODS
A total of 189 patients who showed clinical manifestations of hand eczema were included in this study. We retrospectively reviewed the clinical characteristics of all the patients and we performed patch tests with the Korean standard series for 24 patients.
RESULTS
The mean duration of the disease was 37.3 months. Housewives were the largest group (32.8%) by occupation, followed by students (23.8%). Bilateral involvement on both hands (83.1%) was significantly more common than unilateral involvement (16.9%). All the patients were categorized into 4 morphological types: the recurrent vesicular type, the hyperkeratotic type, the dry type, and others, and these occurred in 50.3%, 24.3%, 23.8%, and 1.6% of the patients, respectively. The most common aggravating factor was wet work at 24.3 percent. Of the 24 patients for whom the patch test was performed, 20 patients showed a positive reaction to more than one allergen and nickel sulfate was the most common allergen in these patients.
CONCLUSION
This study demonstrated the various clinical characteristics of Korean patients with hand eczema. It is especially remarkable that they had a long clinical course and a higher positive rate on standard patch tests.