DataBowen's disease (squamous cell carcinoma in situ)

Direct links plus the targets, companies, and technologies of this cancer's products.

• Is Bowen's disease cancer? The honest answer is that it is a carcinoma that cannot spread. It is coded 8081/2 in ICD-O, where the final digit means in situ, and D04, carcinoma in situ of skin, in the neoplasm chapter of ICD-10; it is staged as pTis, stage 0, by the system UK reports use; and pathologists call it squamous cell carcinoma in situ. And it is described by Cancer Research UK as pre-invasive, because the malignant cells are trapped above the basement membrane. Both halves of that are true at once, and a person told they have it has been told something that needs treating and not something that threatens their life.
• Why this has a page and actinic keratosis does not, and why the answer did not change when WHO changed its mind. The corpus draws the line at the behaviour code and the registration: actinic keratosis is 8070/0, benign, and L57.0, outside the neoplasm chapter, and is registered as cancer nowhere in the UK; Bowen's disease is 8081/2, in situ, and D04, and the Office for National Statistics states that all in-situ neoplasms, D00 to D09, are registered. That line held when the fifth edition of the WHO skin classification, published in 2025, moved squamous cell carcinoma in situ out of the carcinomas section of its skin chapter and in beside actinic keratosis under carcinoma precursors and benign simulants, where the fourth edition of 2018 had filed it with the carcinomas. WHO moved the heading; the behaviour code, the registration and the guideline did not move, and neither did this page. The reasoning is set out in docs/CANCER-PAGES.md so the next borderline case is decided the same way.
• Registered is not the same as counted. The Office for National Statistics registers in-situ neoplasms, and then defines all cancers as ICD-10 C00 to C97 excluding C44, which excludes both the invasive keratinocyte cancers and, being a range of C codes, anything coded D04. So Bowen's disease is recorded and then does not appear in any headline cancer figure, which is the same fate as its invasive parent for a different reason.
• Why the name is a person's. John Templeton Bowen described the condition in 1912, and the eponym has outlived several attempts to replace it with the accurate description, squamous cell carcinoma in situ. Both appear on British letters, and they mean the same thing. If the report says intraepidermal carcinoma, that is also the same thing.

The same record for scripts and assistants; checked 2026-09-25. Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute “Data from OnCo (onco.cc)”.