Clear Cell Acanthoma: A Review of Clinical and Histologic Variants

Abstract

Degos and Civatte first described clear cell acanthoma (CCA) in 1962 and later in a review article found that, in most instances, the lesion was a solitary red-brown dome-shaped papule that involved the distal lower extremity. The first morphologic variant of CCA was reported as a “giant form of the acanthoma of Degos” which measured 45 × 40 mm, about twice the size of the largest CCA documented earlier. Since then, many variants of CCA have been described, including polypoid, pigmented and atypical. Herein, we describe a new variant of CCA and add another example of the polypoid variant to the literature. The new variant exhibits cellular features of trichilemmoma but architecturally differs from it. We also attempt to broaden the list of CCA variants summarized by Tempark and Shwayder by adding ours and a few more examples of CCA. The new variants of CCA include verrucous, linear, subungual and trichilemmal.