Abstract
Several review articles have summarized the common skin findings in neonates (defined as the first 28-days of life), but since many neonatal conditions can be diagnosed clinically or via other less invasive techniques, a biopsy is often deferred in these extremely young patients. Thus, few studies have examined the real-world histopathological findings of neonatal skin biopsies, so we aim to further understand the conditions for which skin biopsies are performed in neonatal patients. We performed a 10-year pathology database search from 7/1/2013 through 7/1/2023. The results were filtered by skin specimens and patient age to include patients less than four weeks of age. A total of 20 cases were found, including inpatients and outpatients. The diagnoses were then grouped into one of five categories: infectious, congenital, inflammatory, neoplastic, or vascular. The patients’ ages ranged from 1 day to 4 weeks, with a male predominance (3:1). A total of 1 infectious, 7 congenital, 8 inflammatory, 3 neoplastic, and 1 vascular case were found. A summary of each case is included in Table 1. The limited number of cases over the study period confirms that dermatopathology specimens in neonates are relatively rare. Though the number of infectious biopsies was less than expected, this is likely attributed to diagnoses being obtained via less invasive techniques such as culture and PCR. This review helps to clarify the different types of neonatal dermatopathology specimens that may be encountered in practice and also highlights a few of the unique cases.