This tool is an Infectious Mononucleosis Symptoms Checker. It gathers the most important symptoms, signs, and risk factors for this disease. Therefore, it will help anybody who uses it to determine if their symptoms are because of mononucleosis.
Infectious mononucleosis or Mono is a disease because of a viral infection. It can cause unsettling complications in the long run or even death in a minority of cases.
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is, as its name well says, a virus and the source of infectious mononucleosis. This disease comprises three main manifestations, such as fever, adenopathy, and pharyngitis.
Allow me to break this a little. Fever is an elevation of the body temperature above 101.3 °F. Pharyngitis is the term doctors use for referring to the swelling of the throat, which patients manifest as sore throat. And lastly, adenopathy is a swelling of the lymph nodes.
These nodes are throughout the whole body and are the main center where the immune system prepares to attack foreign invaders, like bacteria and viruses, among other microorganisms. So, it makes perfect sense that they swell while battling the recent EBV infection.
People acquire EBV through close contact with other people, mainly within secretions from the mouth and throat. For example, if someone kiss another person or drink from the same water glass, the saliva will pass the virus.
When this virus enters the body, it infects special cells called "B cells" in the blood. They circulate through the bloodstream of the whole body. Therefore, it is easy for the virus to reach out to all the organs like the liver or the lymph nodes.
Most people in the United States get this infection early in life. Practically, half of the people by the age of five years have acquired the infection. However, it still greatly affects young adults.
After clearing the infection, there is a possibility of remaining with prolonged fatigue. On the other hand, although rare, this infection could prompt life-threatening complications, acute as a splenic rupture or chronic and in the long-term as cancer.
This tool is an Infectious Mononucleosis Symptoms Checker. It gathers the most important signs, symptoms, and risk factors for this disease.
Keep in mind that most of the patients with infectious mononucleosis with not develop any symptoms. Accordingly, the only possibility for those patients to know if they have had the infection is through blood exams.
Nevertheless, besides the three main manifestations of this disease (fever, sore throat, and swollen lymph nodes), several other possible symptoms guide doctors towards this infection. And that is what this tool is all about.
The tool aims to identify through questions the most important symptoms and risk factors for developing this disease. Hence, it would tell anybody whose it the likelihood of their symptoms being because of this infection.
This tool does not replace the necessary blood and overall exams doctors perform to diagnose this disease definitely. Despite this, the tool represents an estimate for whoever uses it.
Originally published at //symptoms.care on October 22, 2020.
