Infectious Diseases: Clinical picture

A patient will have certain complaints: symptoms, examples of which are neck pain, cough or loss of strength in the legs. There will also usually be objective signs identified by the physician treating the patient. Examples are neck stiffness, crepitations and hyperreflexia. One and the same disease may take different forms in different people. There is a spectrum of manifestations: there is individual variability (for example immunological resistance) and furthermore the symptoms and signs depend on the stage of the disease. Sometimes the degree of infection (for example worm load) is important. Whether a particular symptom, for example blood in the urine (haematuria), is highly indicative of a specific diagnosis depends on the local frequency (prevalence) of the disorder (for example, bilharziasis is frequent in Africa but not in India). A symptom may be specific to a greater or lesser extent, for example fever can be caused by numerous diseases. Fever is thus fairly aspecific for a certain diagnosis. Muscle spasms triggered by sudden noise are strongly indicative of tetanus. This sign rarely occurs in other diseases and is thus relatively specific for tetanus.

Category: Medicine Notes