Skin Tags
What are skin tags?
Skin tags are painless noncancerous growths commonly found hanging in places where your skin folds like the armpits, groin, thighs, eyelids, neck and under the breasts. Although the causes aren’t fully understood but the role of friction around the areas of the body where the skin folds is considered as one of the main causes that leads to skin tags. While tiny skin tags rub off on their own, the tags that hurt or start to bother can be removed with the help of a laser treatment. One can identify a skin tag by the peduncle. Unlike moles and other skin growths – a skin tag hangs off the skin by this small stalk.
How you can identify a skin tag:
- Skin tags are usually soft and flesh-coloured. Sometimes they are darker than the surrounding skin and that’s because of hyper-pigmentation.
- Can be smooth and round in appearance or wrinkly and asymmetrical.
- Some skin tags are thread-like resembling grains of rice.
- Twisted skin tags have a tendency to turn black in colour because of lack of blood flow.
People at greater risks of getting skin tags are:
- Overweight
- Pregnant women
- Heredity
- People with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes
- Have HPV
Treatments:
Cryotherapy:
Cryotherapy involves freezing of the skin tag with liquid nitrogen.
Electro Surgery:
Electro surgery burns the skin tag using high frequency electrical energy.
Ligation:
Ligation is a process that involves removal of skin tag by tying it off with a surgical thread in order to cut off its blood flow.
Normally, if you have a small skin tag, the doctor wouldn’t use any anesthesia for the procedure. But, local anesthesia is used while operating large or multiple skin tags on a patient.
