Introduction: Healthy–looking nails are an important part of an individual’s body image. This study is aimed at describing the clinico–epidemiological profile of patients with nail disorder which present to our outpatient clinic.

Methodology: All patients, aged above 18 years who presented to our outpatient clinic with nail complaints and were diagnosed with any nail disorder were included. A detailed history, clinical examination and relevant investigations of all included patients were recorded in a pre–tested semi–structured proforma. The nail bed, nail folds, and hyponychium were assessed for discoloration, erythema, growths, scale, cuticle attachment, and vascular abnormalities, including pitting, ridging, longitudinal and transverse grooving. Associations were ascertained between frequency of various nail disorders with age, gender of the patients and degree of involvement.

Results: During the study period 2509 patients were diagnosed with nail disorders at our hospital. Only nail involvement was in 74% of the patients, 13% had nails with skin or hair involvement and 12% had nail involvement with systemic diseases. The most common nail disorder diagnosed at our center was onychomycosis (39.9%), followed by onychomycosis and paronychia (13.2%). Other nail disorders diagnosed in the patient population were subungual hypertrophy, pitting, onycholysis, onychoschizia, melanonychia, half and half nail, trachonychia, onychogryphosis and subungual melanoma.

Conclusions: Onychomycosis was the most common nail disorder in our patient population. People need to be more aware and physicians should be clinically alert to suspect dermatological and systemic diseases in patients presenting primarily with nail disorders.