Image Challenge

Rudrajit Paul

Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research and Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital, Kolkata, India

Corresponding Author: Rudrajit Paul, Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research and Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital, Kolkata, India, Phone: +91 9433824341, e-mail: r.paul.medicalcollege@gmail.com

How to cite this article Paul R. Image Challenge. Bengal Physician Journal 2019;6(2):36.

Source of support: Nil

Conflict of interest: None

A 40-year-old man, in the critical care unit, was found to have these skin lesions (Fig. 1) during daily rounds. No new drug had been introduced in the last 3 days and he had no known skin disorder. He did not complain of any symptoms related to the lesions.

What is the diagnosis? What is the treatment?

Fig. 1: Lesions on the patient’s skin

Answer

This patient has miliaria crystallina (sometimes called sweat bubbles in colloquial terms).

Treatment

Cooling and drying of involved areas and avoiding occlusive dresses. Prolonged covering of patients with thick blankets in the critical care may lead to this condition (due to prolonged hyperthermia). Thus, patients in the CCU should not be covered round the clock.

Preventive Treatment

Frequent change of posture to prevent occlusion of sweat gland ducts in back and flexor areas.

________________________
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and non-commercial reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.