Signs and symptoms


A diagram of a human torso labelled with the most common symptoms of an acute HIV infection
Signs (including enlarged liver and spleen) and symptoms (including headache and vomiting) of acute HIV infection.

Signs and symptoms are the observed or detectable signs, and experienced symptoms of an illness, injury, or condition.

Signs are objective and externally observable; symptoms are a person's reported subjective experiences.[1] A sign for example may be a higher or lower temperature than normal, raised or lowered blood pressure or an abnormality showing on a medical scan. A symptom is something out of the ordinary that is experienced by an individual such as feeling feverish, a headache or other pains in the body.[2][3]

  1. ^ Sadock, Benjamin J.; Sadock, Virginia A. (2008). Kaplan & Sadock's Concise Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. ISBN 978-0-7817-8746-8.
  2. ^ "Beyond Intuition: Quantifying and Understanding the Signs and Symptoms of Fever". clinicaltrials.gov. 5 October 2017. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
  3. ^ "Symptoms and self-help guides by body part". NHS inform. Retrieved 9 January 2021.

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