Prevalence of skin disease in patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus in Bangkok, Thailand.

A detailed study of the skin lesions of 248 patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Bangkok, Thailand, is reported. The study population consisted of 140 patients with asymptomatic disease (stage I), 27 patients with symptomatic disease (stage II), and 81 patients with advanced stage of the disease (stage III). Ninety-five percent of all patients were observed to have one or more skin disorders. Conditions with prevalence higher than 5% included oral candidiasis (34.3%), pruritic papular eruption (32.7%), seborrhoeic dermatitis (21.0%), herpes zoster (16.1%), oral hairy leucoplakia (14.9%), herpes simplex (10.9%), onychomycosis (9.3%), cutaneous ringworm (7.7%), psoriasis (6.5%), and folliculitis (5.6%). Patients in the stage II and III subgroups were found to have a significantly more number of skin disorders than patients in stage I. The prevalence pattern of skin disorders in this study are generally similar to previous studies in the literature. Three notable differences, however, emerge from this study: (1) the high prevalence of pruritic papular eruption in all subgroups, (2) the high prevalence of Penicillium maneffei infection in patients with advanced disease, and (3) the absence of Kaposi's sarcoma in the study population. Knowledge about the cutaneous disease pattern in the locals will be more clinically relevant for proper care of the patients.