Dermoscopy in General Dermatology for Skin Color 2022

* High-quality color printing
* Same content as the original book
* Affordable alternative for personal reading
⚠️ Not an officially licensed or publisher-issued edition

Enzo Errichetti and Aimilios Lallas edited a superb and fascinating book on the use of dermoscopy in general dermatology for skin of colour. This book is an additional evidence of the key role of dermoscopy, representing essentially the dermatologist stethoscope!

There is no doubt that this reference will be of uppermost importance for clinicians dealing with routine dermatologic disorders, and this is even more relevant for clinicians visiting patients of skin of colour, where the assessment of clinical morphology is different due to the patient skin type. To achieve their mission, Enzo and Aimilios brought together the experience of international experts to document clinical and dermoscopic patterns of non-tumoural dermatoses in patients from Africa, Asia and South America.

The book is very well organized, with 3 main sections dedicated to inflammatory and infiltrative diseases, infectious disease, and finally, hair, nail and mucosal disorders. Each disease is then described with a short introduction, followed by the clinical presentation and finally by the dermoscopic findings: definitely a short and sweet approach! Of course, of greatest value is the collection of over 700 illustrations used to describe the various dermoscopic features of each specific disorder.

Each non-tumoural condition is generally characterized by one or two predominant dermoscopic criteria, which are defined as structures prevailing over other coexisting features. Although a well-established and structured approach for the analysis of dermoscopic images is available in the field of tumoural diseases, the criteria and terminology used for inflammatory dermatoses in the literature are often variable, metaphoric and poorly comprehensible, with consequent lack of a systematic analytic approach. For this reason, each disease is described in this book as a set of five dermoscopic parameters (vessels, scales, follicular/eccrine findings, other structures and specific clues), which have been recently proposed by a consensus document of the International Dermoscopy Society led by Enzo and Aimilios.

Once talking with Aimilios about our common professional commitments and future plans, he stated that ‘sooner or later each disease described in dermatology books will include a dermoscopic illustration together with those showing classic clinical and histopathologic features’. In my estimation, the time has arrived, and definitely, Enzo’s and Aimilios’ book is a wonderful example in this direction.