Misdiagnosis, treatments, and outcomes in the immunobullous diseases in children.

As a group, the immunobullous diseases are very uncommon in childhood. We analyzed all cases of immunobullous diseases in individuals under age 18 years which we had evaluated at the University of Colorado and examined their age of onset, diagnostic difficulties, treatments, and outcomes. This was considered to be a representative North American population within a single referral area which contained a diverse ethnic population mixture. Further, we believe this study to be uniquely uniform in that all the patients were examined by us using the same diagnostic strategy and the immunofluorescent (IF) diagnostic tests were performed by the same individual (J.C. Huff) using uniform diagnostic criteria and consistent IF techniques.