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When I was a first-year dermatology resident, Stone and Shroeter reported a study of patients with bullous pemphigoid (BP), in which they found that these patients were no more likely to have an associated malignancy than age-, sex-, and year-of-diagnosis–matched patients with contact dermatitis or psoriasis (Arch Dermatol 1975; 111:991.) However, most BP patients are elderly, and the notion of a potential association with malignancy has remained in our literature, primarily in textbooks and review articles.
In a current study, investigators studied 359 patients with BP. Of these, 48 patients had a malignancy. In 16, the malignancy preceded the BP diagnosis by more than 5 years; 14 had a malignancy 5 or fewer years before diagnosis; 4 had a …