Morphologically and Genetically Diagnosed Dermal Dioctophyme Larva in a Chinese Man: Case Report

We present a case of a nematode larva infection found in a cutaneous nodule excised from the left flank of a 48-year-old Chinese male, who was naturalized in Japan and comes and goes frequently to China and Japan. Clinical diagnosis at his first visit to a local hospital was epidermoid cyst. Pathological diagnosis of surgical specimen was cutaneous larva migrans and detailed morphological observation suggested that the worm in the subcutis was a dioctophimatid larva. DNA sequence analysis of the formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded tissues revealed the larva as the giant kidney worm, Dioctophyme renale (Goeze, 1972).