Crown vessels and shiny white structures in dermoscopy of histoid leprosy.

Leprosy is a chronic granulomatous infection caused by Mycobacterium leprae with varied clinical presentations. Owing to its low incidence, together with its myriad clinical presentations, leprosy poses a diagnostic challenge and can easily be confused with other infective and noninfective granulomatous dermatoses.1 Dermoscopy is a simple and non-invasive technique that is widely used for the diagnosis and monitoring of melanoma and nonmelanoma skin cancers and many inflammatory disorders. However, the utility of this technique for the diagnosis of granulomatous diseases has only recently been demonstrated.2 Although dermoscopy shows diagnostically useful patterns in infections and inflammatory diseases with granulomatous presentations, the dermoscopic features of leprosy are poorly documented in the literature.