A 22-year-old man in Italy had a penile bump that kept growing and stayed inflamed, even after several courses of antibiotics. When surgeons finally removed it, the cause turned out to be hair that had worked its way into his skin and set off a chronic inflammatory reaction.
The diagnosis was a pilonidal sinus, a condition usually found in the cleft between the buttocks. Doctors at San Carlo di Nancy Hospital in Rome described the case in a report in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports published July 21. According to the authors, only 29 cases of pilonidal disease of the penis have been reported in the medical literature.
