Signs and Symptoms
Early symptoms can include nausea, vomiting (sometimes bile stained (green color)), pulling legs to the chest area, and intermittent moderate to severe cramping abdominal pain. Pain is intermittent not because the intussusception temporarily resolves, but because the intussuscepted bowel segment transiently stops contracting. Later signs include rectal bleeding, often with "red currant jelly" stool (stool mixed with blood and mucus), and lethargy. Physical examination may reveal a "sausage-shaped" mass felt upon palpation of the abdomen.
In children or those too young to communicate their symptoms verbally, they may cry, draw their knees up to their chest or experience dyspnea (difficult or painful breathing) with paroxysms of pain.
Fever is not a symptom of intussusception. However, intussusception can cause a loop of bowel to become necrotic, secondary to ischemia due to compression to arterial blood supply. This leads to perforation and sepsis, which causes fever.
Read more about this topic: Intussusception (medical Disorder)
Famous quotes containing the words signs and/or symptoms:
“All signs of superhuman nature appear in man as illness or insanity.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)