For a couple of years now, these purple blotches have appeared occasionally on my forearms. They last maybe a week and slowly fade away. After a few weeks a new set will appear. Very rarely, just twice, they will bleed. They appear on either arm.
I’m traveling so I included a Thai 5 baht piece in the photo for scale, very close to the size of a US quarter. I’m not alarmed, but very curious what these might be. I’ve shown pictures of them in passing to a couple of doctors (who I was seeing for other reasons) who have shrugged and told me not to worry about it. Today a companion saw them and was kind of alarmed on my behalf, so I thought I’d give an ask here. Anyone got a guess?
IANA medical anything. The fact they’re as linear as they are suggests the same idea as @puzzlegal said: you bumped the edge of a table or something unwittingly and created a line of bruises.
Either that or the alien worm is slowly eating its way up your arm towards your brain.
My husband gets this, and my mom did, too. It has an unflattering name: “senile purpura”. It afflicts us fair-skinned folks when we get old. The slightest bruising or sun exposure will bring them on.
I get them all the time an I’m on blood thinners. I get them on my forearms and sometimes on my calves. I just assumed I was scratching myself at night or something.
I do use blood thinners (Xarelto) but the arm spots predate my blood thinner use by almost a year. I almost wonder if the blotches heralded my future blood clot in my leg.
I’d guess the same. They manifest in lines as if there were a scratch, but there’s no scratch. And scratches happen all the time, so it’s so weird I didn’t get these lines of bruisy weird things until the last couple of years. What changed?
Interesting. I googled the term and the photos looked much more severe than what I get: ugly blotches the size of an orange across your arm. But this sounds like what may be happening maybe, and thank you.
ETA: googling more senile purpura, it does look like what I have. Weird that it came on so suddenly.
Very likely it didn’t. It reached a magnitude and frequency that you “saw” it, but very likely was occurring a bit less notably quite a bit before that.
Other possible contributors are fish oil and NSAIDS. I suspect statins as they decrease platelet aggregation but can’t find anything on it looking quickly. Mostly though it’s just how our connective tissue in our skin ages.
I don’t take fish oil, rarely NSAIDs (and not at all on while blood thinners) and I’m not on statins.
Is my skin getting ‘thinner’? It was quite annoying to suddenly be bleeding from my arm while just watching TV with my friend on my couch last spring (pre thinners). I mean, WTF? No scratch, no exertion, no trauma. Sitting. On. The Couch. Am I going to just spring a leak randomly from now on?
My skin has been thick and tough through my life but is now susceptible to picking up bruises like that. My dogs claws do that easily if he gets overexcited and starts jumping on me. I also get similar marks just from banging my arms against something hard and sharp like the corner of a concrete wall or a piece of angle iron. Maybe this is related to blood pressure medicines or my red blood cell count is high from erythrocytosis. And that reminds me to get my hemoglobin checked.
My dad had this (he was fair skinned) and it drove him nuts. Basically every little bump or scratch resulted in these “bruises.” He was also mad because his doctor was not concerned and also told him there was nothing that could be done. It was just part of getting old.
My father had this a lot, and my mother didn’t. Both equally fair-skinned. I’m now 73 and I haven’t had any yet. I inherited a lot of unpleasant things from my mother, like allergies and eczema. Maybe I also inherited resistance to this phenomenon.
