My fiancee recently began noticing some very small spots on her legs (lower and upper). She is 24 and said at 14 that she had similar spots which a doctor told her was vasculitis. She is convinced that this is something very serious and plans to get a biopsy. She is borderline obsessed w/ any changes in her skin and is very pale so she definitely would have noticed if this ever happened at any other point since she was first diagnosed at 14. What I need is some more knowledge. Is this serious? Does this indeed sound like vasulitis? What else might this be? It doesn’t look like much to me, but she is very upset and I don’t want to just dismiss this as being nothing (which is what I would do if it were me). Thanks for any info you might have!
Nifty vasculitis tutorial (requires Flash).
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials/vasculitis.html
A little light reading.
http://www.hamline.edu/lupus/articles/vasculitis.html
http://vasculitis.med.jhu.edu/faqs/faqs.html
http://www.merck.com/pubs/mmanual/section5/chapter50/50k.htm
Page O’ Links.
Bottom line: she needs a doctor’s diagnosis to be sure it really is vasculitis. Just because a doctor told her when she was 14 that that’s what it was doesn’t mean that that’s what it is. Also, from my quick browsing on these vasculitis websites, it looks like if she’d been diagnosed with vasculitis ten years ago, she’d have been under a doctor’s care for it ever since. It’s not something you look at and shrug, “Oh–vasculitis”, and then forget about, because it’s considered an immune system disorder like lupus.
So maybe she didn’t really have vasculitis, and the doctor told her wrong, or maybe she’s misremembering “varicose” as “vasculitis”.
Anyway, if she’s worried about it, and if she really was told she had vasculitis ten years ago, she should definitely consult a doctor.