Kaposi's Sarcoma

Abstract

In 1872, Moritz Kaposi, a Hungarian dermatologist, described five men with aggressive “idiopathic multiple pigmented sarcomas of the skin.”¹ One patient died of gastrointestinal bleeding 15 months after the initial appearance of the skin lesions, and an autopsy showed visceral lesions in the lungs and the gastrointestinal tract. Subsequently, other investigators described four clinical variants of Kaposi's sarcoma that had identical histologic features but developed in specific populations and had different sites of involvement and rates of progression ( Table 1 ). In the light of recent discoveries regarding the viral pathogenesis of Kaposi's sarcoma, these variants most likely represent different manifestations of the same pathologic process.