Morphea overlapping borderline leprosy: An unusual association.

Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, is a chronic infectious disease with a low transmission rate, affecting the skin, peripheral nerves, eyes, and mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract, yet it may also be systemic. Cases of borderline leprosy are the acute or subacute stages of the disease. They are immunologically unstable and reflect the gradual variation in resistance against the etiological agent. Localized scleroderma or morphea is a fibrosing disease of the skin and underlying tissues that results from the disrupted function of growth factors (platelet-derived growth factor, i.e., PDGF) and receptor expression (as in the case of transforming growth factor ß, i.e., TGF-ß). Herein, we report a female patient with borderline tuberculoid leprosy (BT) who, during multidrug treatment (MDT), developed an indurated lesion of morphea exactly on the surface of an infiltrated patch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]