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Kawasaki disease

What are the symptoms?

Affected children develop a high fever lasting longer than five days together with redness of the eyes, the inside of the mouth and the lips. There may also be a skin rash, swollen glands, and redness and swelling of the hands and feet. Children with Kawasaki disease often have joint pains or arthritis and have characteristic miserableness. Later in the illness there may be peeling of the skin around the finger nails or elsewhere on the hands and feet. Some children do not develop all of these typical features and various other rarer symptoms occur in others. These include aseptic meningitis, liver dysfunction, hydrops of the gall bladder, diarrhoea, otitis media (see entry, Deafness), uveitis, pneumonitis erythema and induration (hardness) at the site of BCG vaccination, together with atypical or incomplete presentations of the classical features of Kawasaki disease.

View Background Background  |  How is it diagnosed? View How is it diagnosed?

Medical text written May 1996 by Professor M Levin, Professor of Paediatrics, St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London, UK. Last reviewed April 2007 by Dr A J Pollard, Reader in Paediatric Infection and Immunity, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

 

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