Background: Although dermatitis herpetiformis (DH) is a relatively common disease in Caucasian populations, this disease is very rare in Asian populations including the Japanese.
Methods and results: We present a Japanese DH patient, who showed a fibrillar pattern of deposition of IgA, IgG, IgM and C3. The HLA typing revealed no B8/DR3. The survey of the Japanese literature and the comparison to studies on American or European DH revealed several interesting differences: high frequency of the fibrillar pattern, relatively high incidence of deposits of immunoglobulins other than IgA, rarity of gluten-sensitive enteropathy and HLA-B8/DR3 in Japanese DH.
Conclusion: The present study suggests that there may be a significant difference in pathophysiology between Caucasian and Japanese DH patients.