Plantar Warts

Plantar Warts. As the name suggests, they occur mainly on the soles of the feet; they can sometimes be found on the palms of the hands. They are deeply set in the skin, lying in flask-shaped cavities, being wider at the bottom than at the top. The important symptoms are pain and tenderness.

Plantar warts occur singly at pressure sites like the balls of the feet and the heel; daughter warts are found in the contiguous areas. Clinically, a plantar wart appears as a painful, tender, hyperkeratotic, circular plaque, with a diameter of about one to one-and-a-half centimeters.

Scraping the surface of the wart with a blade reveals papillae with punctate capillary bleeding; papillae can be seen more clearly when silver nitrate paint is applied on them. An agglomeration of these warts on the sole with a polygonal outline and a roughened surface is called mosaic wart. It is usually superficial and painless. The infection is contracted in swimming pools: public bath rooms and less commonly, on the beaches.

A plantar wart must be differentiated from a corn. The latter is at a pressure site and has a smooth surface and when its surface is scraped, found absent is the papillomatous surface typical of the plantar wart.

The greatest amount of pain is felt when the corn is pressed from the top, the pain increases towards the evening; in contrast with a plantar wart, in which pain is felt when the wart is pressed from the sides as well as from the top, it being the greatest in the morning, on first putting the weight of the body on the feet.

Epidermodysplasia verruciformis is considered by many to be caused by invasion of the virus warts in genetically predisposed persons, manifested by profuse coalescent eruptions of verruca plana type lesions, usually on the limbs.

Warts