Smooth muscle is seen in the skin in three locations, the arrectores pilorum muscles, the wall of vessels and the specialized muscles in genital skin (the dartos, vulvar, and mamillary muscles of the scrotum, labia majora, and the breast, respectively). We report a case of a leiomyosarcoma of the dartos muscle in a 57-year-old man. The histological features of this tumor are similar to the previously reported cases of leiomyosarcomas of the skin thought to originate in arrectores pilorum muscles and the wall of vessels.
Cigarette Smoking and ArteriosclerosisRecent reports (1, 2) have indicated that heavy smokers of cigarettes are more prone than nonsmokers to have heart attacks due to myocardial infarction. The nature of this relationship has not been fully explored, and a number of different interpretations can be suggested.Myocardial infarcts may be associated with severer symptoms in heavy smokers than in nonsmokers and thus be detected more readily at the time of onset. Although tho clinical and electrocardiographic recognition of such lesions has improved greatly, a high percentage of the infarcts found at necropsy are not diagnosed during life (3), presumably because they do not cause pronounced or characteristic symptoms. No positive correlation between the incidence of myocardial infarction at necropsy and cigarette smoking has as yet been reported.A high incidence of myocardial infarction in heavy smokers could depend to some extent on alterations in blood flow due to various mechanisms, and not entirely on the degree of sclerosis of the coronary arteries. In other words, cigarette smokers may be more vulnerable to ischemic infarction than nonsmokers with an equivalent degree of arterial narrowing. Kagan et. al. (4) suggested that cigarette smoking does not necessarily produce its effect through the pathogenetic mechanism of atherosclerosis but may operate in an
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