Man grows ‘horn’ from tip of his penis leaving doctors baffled by rare condition

 A man presented himself to doctors with a 'horn' growing from the tip of his penis, leaving medical professionals baffled by the extremely rare condition.

Doctors diagnosed the man, from China, with a cutaneous horn, a hard mass of keratin — the protein that forms skin, hair and nails - which turned out to be cancerous.

The unnamed 43-year-old patient reported to the hospital in Taiyuan, China, where medics removed the two inch long brown yellowish cancerous build up.

“Clinical examination showed a conical lesion projecting from the anterior surface of the glans penis,” wrote Xi Zhang and Haoying Shi, of the Second Hospital of Shanxi Medical University’s urology department, in the Asian Journal of Surgery.

The man had previously gotten a “rice-sized” growth removed from the tip of his penis three years prior, only for another calcified build-up to return in its place.

The condition usually appears on the head and face, hence 'horn', and growths on the penis account for only “4.2 to 5.5% of all cutaneous horns,” according to the study.

A history of STDs, excess foreskin, poor hygiene and penile injuries are all kickers for the type of growths the man has experienced, reports stated.

However, he was not undergoing any treatment for a sexually transmitted disease at the time.

The New York Post reported that the growths tend to appear within one year of circumcision, leading experts to believe this may be a cause.

In the Chinese man's case, doctors removed the mass and extracted around a half-inch of tissue from under its base.

An analysis of the mass revealed that the man has squamous cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer. However, he was deemed to be cancer free after the procedure and is now fully recovered, the study states.