what are the symptoms of tuberculosis?
.
When someone comes back from a country with symptoms of tuberculosis, a doctor is consulted and they are checked for a possibility of tuberculosis.
When a patient has latent TB, they will not show any symptoms. However, when someone has active TB he or she will show signs of sickness, and is able to spread the disease to others.
The symptoms of tuberculosis depend on where the disease has infected the body. Tuberculosis can for example infect the lungs, the kidneys and the spine. Nonetheless, generally all types of tuberculosis develop slowly. The common symptoms of tuberculosis are fatigue or weakness, poor appetite often combined with weight loss, hot flushes linked with sweating at night, chills, fever and a cough lasting longer than usual.
If tuberculosis attacks the lungs, which is the most common form of TB, it can cause pain in the chest when breathing and coughing. The person infected also coughs up blood. The infection might also lead to breathlessness which progressively becomes worse. If the disease attacks other organs other symptoms will appear. If the disease has infected your spine you will feel pain in your back. While if tuberculosis attacks the kidneys it can cause blood in the urine.
The symptoms of someone with extrapulmonary (outside of the lungs)TB differ, but often include persistently swollen glands because of the constant coughing. Some patients also experience abdominal pain and a stubborn headache. If the tuberculosis has infected joints and bone, it can cause the bone or joint to become painful and stiff, which restricts the movement. In extreme cases tuberculosis might also cause seizures, which basically is abnormal electrical activity in the brain.
If a pregnant woman has active tuberculosis it can infect her baby either before or during childbirth. Approximately half of the children who are born by women with active tuberculosis develop signs of the disease during their first year of living. These symptoms could be: fever, delayed development and growth, respiratory distress and having an enlarged liver and spleen.
Written by: Signe and Marleen de Jonge
Maak jouw eigen website met JouwWeb