Seborrheic Keratosis as an Unchanging Companion of Aging. Modern View on Etiology and Pathogenesis
Throughout its history, mankind has longed to extend life, and the problem of ‘eternal youth’ was most acute. A lot of myths, philosophical and religious speculations are associated with the idea of prolonging youth. This topic has also developed in modern science: cellular technology, genetic engineering, hormonal therapy and many other methods are primarily aimed at combating aging. Age changes are most noticeable in the case of the skin. In the process of aging, the skin changes not only externally. Deep structural, exchange and functional changes occur in it. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, plague and leprosy epidemics made a person especially attentive to skin changes, especially to the appearance of tumors and pigmentations on the face, which could be one of the first signs of a terrible disease. Therefore, many signs of skin diseases are realistically reflected in painting and sculpture already from ancient times. Our article is devoted to the problem of seborrheic keratosis, the most common tumor of the skin affecting almost 100% of the population. We discussed modern views on the etiology and pathogenesis of the disease, while at the same time paying considerable attention to the histological and immune-histo-chemical features of seborrheic keratosis (SK). We discuss these features based on both the analysis of literature sources carried out by us and our own multi-year immunological and histological studies pursued in Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University. In the pathogenesis of seborrheic keratosis, a significant role is played by disorders in the regulation of the cell cycle. The variety of clinical and histological forms of SK reflects its poly-etiological nature, which, in our opinion, combines genetic predisposition, metabolic disturbances and loss of adequate control in the regulation of the cell cycle. Thus, the programmed death of the cell, apoptosis, is replaced by an irreversible process of "aging", which leads not only to the skin, but also to internal organs, to a decrease in the functional activity of cells and the development of diseases.