Severe gastrointestinal involvement in paraneoplastic pemphigus.

Abstract

Paraneoplastic pemphigus (PNP) is an autoimmune mucocutaneous disease, associated with neoplasia, which has characteristic clinical, histological and immunological features. While respiratory epithelial involvement has been described in several cases, lesions in the colon epithelium have never been reported. We describe a 57-year-old Japanese woman with PNP who had many aphthae-like erosions on the colon epithelium, in addition to typical mucocutaneous PNP lesions. The intestinal erosions had histological features similar to those of PNP and linear deposition of complement, but not IgG, was observed along the colon epithelial basement membrane.