A strange bruise on a woman’s arm indicates a rare type of tumor

A woman has a strange greenish-blue bruise on her arm after dislocating herself while doing an acrobatic form of yoga.

But even after applying ice for a long time after the accident, the condition of the bruise did not decrease. It turned out that in fact it was a rare, slowly growing tumor.

Doctors described the woman’s strange case in a new report published Wednesday, Feb. 8, in the journal JAMA Dermatology.

The patient, in her thirties, reported that the bruise appeared a few days after her left arm was dislocated. She went to the doctors two years after the initial injury, and the bruise was still there.

Doctors examined her hand and noted “indistinct blue-green sclerotic tissue” on the back of her hand. An X-ray showed swelling of the soft tissues of the arm, and an MRI showed a small bump just under the skin.

The tissue taken from this mass was full of fat cells, the iron-containing hemosiderin pigment, and long thin cells known as spindle cells.

These cells appear in various tumors of the skin, mucous membranes of internal organs, bones and soft tissues, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The doctors suggested that the woman had a hemosiderinal fibroblast lipoma (HFLT), a rare type of tumor that most often forms on the foot or ankle, but appears on the hand or wrist in 10% of reported cases.

Hemosiderin fibroblast lipomatous tumor (HFLT) is a “rare category that has only recently been described” and the authors of the case report stated that this category was first described in 2000.

Studies say that these abnormal tumors are usually benign and rarely become cancerous.

The authors of the report added: “The exact etiology of hemosiderin fibrosarcoma has not yet been elucidated, and the role of trauma in its development requires further study.”

The physicians who first described hemosiderin fibrosarcoma believed that these tumors could form as a result of a “reactive inflammatory process” after a traumatic injury suffered by a person. This is because many of their patients have reported a traumatic event in the same part of the body where hemosiderin fibrosarcoma subsequently formed.

Other doctors have hypothesized that damage to the blood vessels may somehow trigger tumor formation, but more research is needed to confirm the true cause of the condition, the report’s authors say.

Source: Living Science