REVIEW PAPER
Dercum’s disease (adiposis dolorosa): a review of clinical presentation and management
1
Department of Internal Medicine, Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Medical University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
Submission date: 2019-07-23
Final revision date: 2019-08-07
Acceptance date: 2019-09-17
Online publication date: 2019-10-31
Publication date: 2019-11-19
Reumatologia 2019;57(5):281-287
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Dercum’s disease (adiposis dolorosa) is a rare disease of unknown etiology characterized by painful subcutaneous adipose tissue deposits with various localization over the body. The deposits occur histologically as lipomas and are associated with overweight or obesity and a variety of psychiatric disturbances (anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances). Classification of Dercum’s disease is related to size and location of adipose nodules (generalized diffuse, generalized nodular, localized nodular and juxta-articular forms). Diagnosis in based on clinical presentation and exclusion of a number of other disorders associated with lipomas. There is no generally accepted management of the patients. Liposuction or lidocaine application has been reported successful in some cases. Other therapeutic methods have been reported but their effectiveness is based on anecdotal descriptions only, and were not confirmed in clinical trials.
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Copyright: © Narodowy Instytut Geriatrii, Reumatologii i Rehabilitacji w Warszawie. This is an Open Access journal, all articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
| eISSN: | 2084-9834 |
| ISSN: | 0034-6233 |
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