Strawberry Hemangioma also known as Infantile hemangiomas are most common harmless tumors of infancy. They result due to rapidly growing and dividing of endothelial cells during infancy. In most of the cases Strawberry Hemangiomas will clinically resolve by the age of 9-10 years.

Strawberry Hemangioma may occur in any parts of the body but most frequently seen on head and neck areas ( more then 60% ), the rest 25% may be on trunk, and 15% on the extremities. Sometimes they may also occur in liver, gallbladder, spleen, lung, lymph nodes, GI tract,, uninary bladder, larynx and CNS.  Frequency of Hemangiomas are more common in white infants then black or asian infants and female are more affected then males.

About 30% of hemangioma appears at birth and rest may appear within few weeks after birth. Initially they may appear as white flat lesion followed by fine telangiectasias. Within few weeks they appear flat or raised red/crimson color lesion growing rapidly till it reaches its peak at around 12 months. If the deeper skin is involved they may appear as blue or purple color. The size of hemangiomas may range from 0.5-5cm , in few cases they can be as large as 20cm.  After they reaches their peak size, they usually remains fixed and later resolve . They start to resolve as early as few months to 2-3 years. By the age of 9 most of the hemangioma are completely resolved.

Treatment of Strawberry Hemangioma:

In most of the cases treatment is not usually required as it usually resolve without any treatment. The lesion will resolve to its normal skin color after some years. But around 50-60 % of the cases the skin may resolve incompletely with permanent changes to the skin. For some difficult cases which may affect child, your doctor might prescribe some oral or intralesional corticosteroids to slow the growing process and prevent any complications.

Laser surgery using lashlamp-pumped pulsed-dye laser is widely used for both reducing the growth and changes in skin color with good results. Multiple treatment session are required usually every 2-4 weeks interval until the complete healing occurs. Other lasers that are being used are frequency-double Nd;YAg, pulsed Nd:YAG and KTP lasers. Carbon dioxide  lasers are less frequently used. The choice of lasers may depend on the type of hemangioma.

Surgical removal of  Hemangioma during its growth phage may sometime  give rise to complications like hemorrhage and damage of structure within them.  But there are few advantage of early excision too. Talk to those specially trained surgeon if you are planning for surgical removal.

If you have any questions regarding Strawberry Hemangioma you can ask us our Cosmetic, Plastic Surgery Talk Section of the forum.

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