Clinical characteristics of chronic cutaneous graft-versus-host disease in Japanese leukemia patients after bone marrow transplantation: low incidence and mild manifestations of skin lesions.

We investigated the incidence of chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and skin and oral lesions in chronic GVHD in 90 Japanese leukemia patients surviving over 100 days after bone marrow transplantation (BMT) from HLA-compatible siblings. The clinical characteristics of chronic cutaneous GVHD occurring in eight of these patients are summarized. There were some differences from previous reports in the USA and Europe. The incidence (8/29: 28%) of skin lesions in chronic GVHD was low in contrast to the previously reported high incidence (79-90%). Cutaneous manifestations in six out of eight patients with chronic GVHD tended to be mild, and lichen-planus-like eruptions in the skin and scleroderma-like lesions, which are well known as representative cutaneous manifestations of chronic GVHD, were rare. Furthermore, our statistical analysis indicated that there was no relationship between pretransplant total body irradiation and GVHD prophylaxis or acute GVHD and the onset of chronic cutaneous GVHD. The present study suggests that the differences from previous reports in the USA and Europe concerning chronic cutaneous GVHD may be attributable to differing genetic backgrounds in Japanese and western populations.