Skin Tags: Causes And Treatments–
Removal is simple at the doctor’s office, but attempting it on your own can cause complications.
The following written content by Heidi Godman
Take a good look at your birthday suit and you’ll probably find small, harmless growths known as skin tags. Though common and nothing to worry about, you should point them out to your dermatologist, especially if they’re new. “To the untrained eye, it may look like a skin tag. But you don’t know that; you need to make sure it isn’t skin cancer,” says Dr. Manjula Jegasothy, a dermatologist based in Miami.
What Are Skin Tags?
A skin tag (the medical term is an acrochordon) is an overgrowth of normal skin. “It may be a small round bump or a long skinny tube. The typical size is between 1 and 3 millimeters in diameter and 1 to 4 millimeters in length,” Jegasothy says. “Some bigger skin tags have a stalk that attaches it to the underlying skin.”
You can have one skin tag or hundreds of them, and they may appear in a range of colors. “Most commonly they are the color of your skin, but they can also be hyperpigmented, so they can be darker like a mole or they can be pink or red,” explains Dr. Barbara Vinci, a dermatologist based in Springfield, Ohio.
Other characteristics of skin tags:
- They can grow anywhere on the body, but occur mostly in the folds of skin – under the arms, on the neck, on the eyelids, under the breasts or near the groin or genitals.
- They contain blood vessels.
- They may contain nerve cells.
Skin Tag Causes
Skin tags occur in about half of the population and become more common with age. It’s not clear why they develop. They’re associated with:
- Genetics. You may get skin tags if you have other family members who’ve had them.
- A condition called Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome. “That’s a rare genetic syndrome, but it would be one case where you’d get more than your average amount of skin tags. But there would be other findings with that,” Vinci says. (Other findings could include lung and kidney problems.)
- Hormone fluctuations, such as pregnancy.
Skin tags are also associated with:
Weight gain.- Obesity.
- Type 2 diabetes.
- Friction.
Jegasothy thinks weight gain is the common denominator in skin tag development. “There could be increased friction because you’ve gained weight. You may have diabetes because you’re overweight. They all go hand in hand,” she notes. Read more from U.S. News & World Report.
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