Mycosis fungoides (MF) is a cutaneous T-cell lymphoma that can undergo local progression with possible systemic dissemination. We report a case of a patient affected by MF with a pancreatic mass that was a diagnostic challenge between primitive tumor and pancreatic metastasis from MF. Clinical setting findings and imaging studies raised the suspicion of a pancreatic primary neoplasm. A diagnostic clue was provided by the combined histomorphologic/immunohistochemical study of pancreatic and cutaneous biopsies, which revealed a pancreatic localization of MF. Considering the rarity of metastatic localization of MF to the pancreas, we next investigated whether chemokine-chemokine receptor interactions could be involved in the phenomenon to provide new insight into the possible mechanisms underlying metastatic localization of MF to the pancreas. Histological analyses of archival pancreatic tissue demonstrated that glucagon-secreting cells of the pancreatic islets expressed the CCL27 chemokine, which may have attracted in our case metastatic MF cells expressing the complementary receptor CCR10.
Keywords: CCL27, CCR10; Differential diagnosis; Extracutaneous localization; Mycosis fungoides; Pancreatic mass.