a 28-year - old male patient came to our hospital outpatient department with complaints of short hair ( 5 - 8 mm in length ) coming out from the left upper eyelid since childhood as reported by his parents .
on close examination by the dermatologist and the physician , the ectopia cilia was located 7 mm superior - lateral to the left upper lid margin .
the patient 's maternal grandfather ( since deceased ) had similar ectopia cilia on left upper eyelid as was reported by patient 's mother [ figure 2 ] .
ectopia cilia with eleven hair lash bundles pedigree chart of ectopia cilia an out - patient surgical excision procedure under local anesthesia was done .
an incision parallel to the lid margin was given and root of the tuft dissected .
histological findings were suggestive of eccrine sweat glands with no features of apocrine glands and dermoid cyst seen as reported by the pathologist . after 3 month 's follow - up , no recurrence was detected .
the presentations in published works falls in two distinct categories : cilia protruding from the anterior surface and cilia protruding from posterior surface of the tarsal plate .
the anteriorly placed cilia are uniformly located on the lateral quarter of the upper eyelid and associated with the presence of apocrine sweat glands and are congenital in origin .
dalgleish presented two cases - one of them had large apocrine sweat glands attached to the follicle .
baghestani and banihashemi reported first case of ectopia cilia with pedigree analysis in a 14-year - old iranian boy with a positive history of the same anomaly in his paternal grandfather demonstrating evidence of an inherited genetic disorder .
reported that only nine cases of ectopia cilia have been reported so far till 1991 .
the differential diagnosis of ectopia cilia includes several eyelash abnormalities such as cilia incarnata , a condition in which an extra eyelash grows from a normal origin through the eyelid to the inner aspect of the tarsal conjunctiva or outward to the skin .
wang et al . presented an unusual case of a dermoid cyst presenting with black hairs emerging from a sinus tract on the upper eyelid and mimicking the appearance of ectopic cilia .
distichiasis and trichiasis are other conditions which also need to be differentiated from ectopia cilia .
trichiasis is a condition in which cilia originates from a normal position on the eyelid turn inward due to entropion .
the nearness of tuft to the tarsal plate , the texture and the direction of the cilia suggest that the origin of the ectopia cilia may probably be related to the eyelashes in our patient .
 we present a case of ectopia cilia in a 28-year - old male patient . 
 ectopia cilia was were seen in the outer third of left upper eyelid . 
 the patient 's maternal grandfather also had ectopia cilia of the left upper eyelid as reported by the patient 's mother . 
 ectopia cilia is a rare condition seen in humans . 
 only 12 cases of ectopic cilia in humans have been reported so far in the world . 
 the present case of ectopia cilia is the second case report in the world with pedigree analysis . 
Introduction
Case Report
Discussion