Skin Manifestations Of Some Gastrointestinal Diseases

Collaboration between specialists is necessary for good practice of medicine. The dermatological examination, mainly based on visual characteristics, can greatly help other specialists when confronted with a seemingly futile skin anomaly.Diseases of the gut frequently show skin symptoms. These can give first and important clues in regard to diagnosis. In general the etiology can be divided into genetic disorders, chronic inflammation, drug reaction, infectious diseases or related to malignancy. In genetic disorders increasing knowledge about the involved genes is available, allowing prenatal diagnosis and screening of clinically not affected family members. In cancer prone syndromes early diagnosis and preventive treatment is crucial. Gastrointestinal malignancies may metastasize into the skin or may produce typical paraneoplastic changes. Inflammatory bowel diseases show a high prevalence, therefore necessitating the knowledge of skin complications such as pyoderma gangrenosum, Sweet’s syndrome and erythema nodosum.Prompt recognition of cutaneous diseases or manifestations associated with the gastrointestinal tract may be lifesaving at times, and may lead to early preventive intervention to decrease risk of malignancy.