Staining Reactions of Elastic Fibres with Special Reference to ‘Elastotic Degenerations’ in the Human Skin

Abstract

PART of our research programme is devoted to clarifying various aspects of skin carcinoma in man and in experimental animals. Careful study of the dermal accumulations of morphologically unusual fibrillar material, consistently found in our specimens, and generally referred to by other authors¹ as “an increase in elastic fibres”, led us to suspect that these accumulations of unusual fibrils were not, in fact, unmodified elastic fibres. We conducted a systematic survey of the staining reactions of the fibrillar masses in the dermis and in diseased blood vessels, always carefully comparing our findings in the abnormal with those of the elastic and other fibres in apparently healthy human skin, aorta and other vessels.