Dermatoporosis. What We Know and What to Expect

With the increase of the medium lifespan in developing countries, skin aging rise attention more and more. In 2007, Kaya and Saurat rebranded the extreme expression of skin fragility under the name of ‘‘dermatoporosis’’ or chronic cutaneous insufficiency/fragility syndrome. Dermatoporosis is still underused in medical literature and nurses and wound specialists know also about this condition, but they call it “skin tears”. There is obvious confusion cause the nursing literature talks about skin tears while dermatologists write about dermatoporosis. Clinical aspects comprise atrophy, purpura, and pseudo-stellate scars. Firstly, the British dermatologist Thomas Bateman described senile purpura in 1818 as purpuric patches arising in elderly people after minimal trauma, especially on the dorsum of the hands. Furthermore, between 1970 and the full documentation of Kaya and Saurat in 2007, we found medical papers about senile purpura, pseudoscars, skin tears, and so on. Starting from this historical data, they bring valuable information according to clinical aspects, histopathology, ultrasonographic aspects, pathophysiology, and therapeutics. This paper aims to analyze published data for improving the diagnosis and management of dermatoporosis.