Fox-Fordyce Disease in Male Identical Twins

Introduction  Fox and Fordyce¹ in 1902 first described two patients with a distinctive pruritic papular eruption of the axillae. Since the original report, approximately 135 publications recording over 150 patients have appeared.Evidence of recent interest in the disease is shown by the excellent papers of Shelley and Levy,² Winkelmann and Montgomery,³ and Spiller and Knox.⁴ A summary of Fox-Fordyce disease occurring in the male has been reported recently by Winkelmann, Kierland, and Montgomery.⁵ The purpose of this report is to document the unusual occurrence of Fox-Fordyce disease in young male identical twins and to record our histopathologic and histochemical observations.

Materials and Methods  The study was conducted on two male identical twins. Tissue was removed from the axilla of each patient and immediately fixed in 10% formalin. The specimens were bisected; half were used for paraffin sections, the remainder for frozen sections. Identical procedures