Periungual Warts Overview

The HPV strand that causes warts is highly contagious and can be spread by skin-to-skin contact with another person or from one part of the infected person's body to another area. Regularly scrubbing your fingernails and toenails, thoroughly drying your feet and wearing sandals or waterproof shoes in public showers can help with wart prevention.

The hands and feet are especially susceptible to HPV since they're in regular contact with many things that may be a carrier for the virus. HPV can enter the body through a cut or abrasion, so fingernail biting is a major contributor to wart growth on the hands. As you nibble at your nails, you can damage the skin around them, allowing the virus to enter [source: American Academy of Dermatology]. When the virus affects this area, abnormal cell growth under and around the nail bed can cause nails to grow abnormally, appear raised and permanently deform the nail. It's important to treat the abnormality as soon as a wart is diagnosed to prevent this type of long-term damage.

Since warts are caused by a virus, it's possible to remove the wart, but it could return if the virus is alive and well. It's also possible that someone who has the virus doesn't know it and never exhibits any symptoms. This makes it hard to avoid situations where you could come into contact with someone who is carrying the wart-causing virus, which is why sanitizing and cleaning are so important. Experts suspect that warts can be caused by stress in addition to physical contact [source: Associated Press].

Despite your best efforts at prevention, you may become infected with periungual warts. Treatment of warts around the nails can include a combination of home remedies and doctor-aided removal. Read on for details.

There are many ways to treat periungual warts. In some cases, they will disappear on their own, but if the growth is painful, unsightly or spreading, there are a few options for removal. It's possible to begin treating the wart by applying salicylic acid or one of several over-the-counter wart removers. Nonprescription liquids or gels come with specific directions to effectively diagnose and remove any questionable growths. While wart removers have harsh chemicals that might zap a wart at the root, keeping fingers and toes cool, clean and covered with the medicine can be a challenge.

Common household items can also be part of a do-it-yourself plan for tricky treatment areas. Suffocate the wart with electrical tape or similar strong adhesive tape [source: WebMD]. Select a tape that doesn't breathe (or isn't made of cloth). Apply the tape to the wart for six days, taking one day off each week. The tape should be replaced daily.

If the problem persists, seek a doctor's help. Cryotherapy, injections or burning processes -- which involve carbon dioxide lasers or electric needles -- are options that attack the infected area and encourage the growth to die and fall off. A possible downside is scarring; the skin around the wart is also damaged during the burning or freezing process [source: American Osteopathic College of Dermatology].

Surgical procedures to remove the wart completely have minor side effects, but this is a last-resort method for recurring warts or abnormally large growths that don't respond to other treatments. A doctor may also prescribe an immunotherapy cream, which is typically used to combat genital warts because the medication is supposed to increase the body's natural ability to reject the virus [source: Taylor MicroTechnology, Inc.].

Not all periungual warts respond the same to treatment, and multiple applications of a product -- or many visits to a dermatologist -- may be required to finally remove the abnormal skin growth. For more information on periungual warts, follow the links on the next page.