Objective: Nevi are the most common benign lesions on the skin. Nevus excisions are performed to exclude the malignancies and for cosmetic reasons. The most reliable approach is excision and pathological examination to exclude malignant transformation for the nevi that have irregular borders, changing color, and a recent growing. The preliminary diagnoses, localizations and pathologic results after the excisional biopsies were presented in this study.

Methods: The study is a retrospective case series including 1.576 excised nevi in 1.382 patients between 2016 and 2019. The patients were evaluated retrospectively in terms of the pathologic results and demographic data such as age, gender and nevus localization. The clinical preliminary diagnoses of all excised lesions were listed as nevi. Malignant and benign results were compared statistically.

Results: The patients included in the study were between the ages of 5-85. Twenty different types of pigmented skin lesions were identified. The mean age of patients with malignant results was 51.1, while the mean age of patients with benign results was 34.4 (p=0.054). The most common nevus locations were head and neck (76.98%), followed by trunk (16.04%), upper extremity (4.39%), and lower extremity (2.57%). When the pathological diagnoses and frequencies of the excised nevi were examined; intradermal compound or blue nevi were observed in 45.4% of all patients.

Conclusion: Melanocytic nevi are mostly benign and excision is mostly performed for cosmetic purposes. However, since there is a possibility of malignant transformation in atypical nevi; these should be excised to rule out malignancy.