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Hello my name is Adrian Richards and I’m the Surgical Director of Aurora clinics and today I’m going to be talking a little bit about skin lesions and the different types of skin lesions.
Well essentially all of us have some moles and the average number of moles an individual has is approximately seven and moles and skin lesions come in all sorts of different forms, but the two main groups are either non-malignant, which is the vast majority of lesions, or cancerous lesions.
So if I first deal with the non-cancerous lesions, the majority of these are moles. So when we’re sort of in our teens, early 20s, we tend to get flat brown moles, and as we get slightly older we get more domed moles, so these sort of almost look like little pearls in the skin and they tend to sort of slowly grow in size, and these are called intradermal nevus which are basically slightly deeper moles. So the most common type of non-cancerous skin conditions are moles, either pigmented, brown, flat moles, or nodular moles, and then as we get slightly older we can get sun spots and areas of thickened skin which are called Seborrheic Keratoses, or areas of sun damaged skin which are called Actinic keratosis, so there are a number of different types of benign skin lesions, and all of these can be removed relatively simply under local anaesthetic, but often it’s quite a good idea to come and have a consultation just to talk about the best way of removing these because it’s easier to remove them when they’re smaller and obviously this leaves less scarring.
The other main group is the cancerous or pre-cancerous skin conditions and I will talk about these in another video, but essentially if you’re worried about any mole you need to come in and see us or see a specialist, and the main real symptoms of concern are change and these are the four main things, change in colour, so this is pigmentation becoming darker normally. Change in surface, so if it was a flat mole and it’s become more irritated and raised. Change in the size, so that’s the contour. Has it changed in size, has it grown in one direction? And the other main change is symptoms, so if it suddenly starts itching or you feel it’s slightly different. So if you’ve got a long-standing mole that has any of these characteristics, changes in any way, it’s normally best to come in just to get it checked out because again, if it is a skin cancer or an early skin cancer if we can get at the mole early and remove it before it has time to spread that’s best for everybody.
So I hope that’s made some sense. Obviously there’s a vast number of different types of skin lesions, the majority are benign so be reassured the majority are completely non-cancerous and can be dealt with relatively simply.
So thank you for listening to this video. If you would like to make a consultation with any of our surgeons to have your skin assessed or to talk about possibly removing any moles please let us know, either by phoning us on 01844 214 362 or emailing us via the Aurora Clinics website which is aurora-clinics.co.uk or by emailing us or phoning us. So thanks very much for listening, I hope you enjoyed the video.
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