الفهرس 
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Abstract
Vitiligo is an acquired depigmenting disorder affecting 0.5% of the world population, without sex or racial differences and it affects all age groups (Taieb and Picardo, 2010). Surgical modalities appear to be the method of choice in stable vitiligo, which comprises approximately 5% of all vitiligo patients (Van Geel et al., 2001), when being not responding to medical treatment.
The present study has been conducted on 60 patients with stable vitiligo were treated with NCEST. Forty patients were treated with NCEST through STSC (D/R - 1/3) (group I), while 10 patients were treated through suction blister roofs mediated NCEST (D/R - 1/3) (group II).
Initial repigmentation was observed 2weeks ± 3 days after surgery and was completed in up to 3 months while the patients are on phototherapy (NBUVB). In group I, marked repigmentation was obtained in 82.7% of cases, while 4.8% showed no response.
There was no statistically significant effect of the age, sex or size of the lesions on the outcome of transplantation. Most treated lesions were of vitiligo vulgaris type (87.5%) and the number of lesions related to other types of vitiligo was few, however there was no statistical significant difference (p > 0.05).
In this study, there was significant difference in the outcome of transplantation among different sites (p = 0.003). We noticed a statistically significant better outcome among trunk, legs and feet lesions compared to that of wrists and elbows lesions. Also, we noticed a marked repigmentation (>75%) in only 22 lesions (64.7%) out of 34 lesions of difficult to treat sites like fingers, toes, knees, elbows, wrists and retroauricular areas, compared to 64 out of 70 lesions (91.4%) in non-difficult to treat sites.
Colour matching of the repigmentation with the surrounding skin was acceptable in all patients. Moreover, hyperpigmentation subsequently faded gradually to match the normal skin colour 1 month after stopping the phototherapy and the end result at the end of 1st year was excellent in 89.4% of cases. Also, we observed an improvement in the repigmentation of the white hair within the 10 lesions with leukotrichia, which starts at about 8 months with up to 90% repigmentation by the end of the first year after procedure.
By comparing group II with group Iʺ in our study, both groups were comparable in the outcome of response to transplantation and colour matching as well as in melanocytes numbers. Although, the total epidermal cells and melanocytes numbers within the suspension were slightly less in group II compared to group Iʺ, there was no statistically significant difference between both groups. On the other hand, the donor area was found to be much better in group II compared to group I, being smoothly epithelialized with no scarring or residue allowing the possibility of reusing for future treatments.