A pre-teen boy's lacy, bruise-like stomach rash, recently traced to a laptop he rested on his abdomen for hours while it charged, faded once he stopped. But his condition, erythema ab igne, better known as toasted skin syndrome, is not always as harmless as his case suggests.
A 2025 case-control analysis of the National Institutes of Health's All of Us database found that people diagnosed with the rash had markedly higher odds of basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma than matched people without it. The study cannot show that heat caused those cancers, but it puts numbers on a risk that a 2025 literature review described as supported only by low-level evidence.
