Kawasaki disease, also known as mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome, is an illness that causes inflammation (swelling and redness) in blood vessels throughout the body.It also affects your lymph nodes and causes symptoms in your nose, mouth, and throat. It’s the most common cause of heart disease in children.It happens in three phases, and a lasting fever usually is the first sign.The condition most often affects kids younger than 5 years old. When symptoms are noticed early and treated, kids with Kawasaki disease begin to feel better within a few days.It’s the most common cause of heart disease in children.Kawasaki disease is also more common in boys than in girls and in children of Asian and Pacific Island descent. However, this disease can affect children and teenagers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.The disorder was first described in 1967 by Tomisaku Kawasaki in Japan.
The disease was first reported by Tomisaku Kawasaki in a four-year-old child with a rash and fever at the Red Cross Hospital in Tokyo in January 1961, and he later published a report on 50 similar cases. Later, Kawasaki and colleagues were persuaded of definite cardiac involvement when they studied and reported 23 cases, of which 11 (48%) patients had abnormalities detected by an electrocardiogram. In 1974, the first description of this disorder was published in the English-language literature. In 1976, Melish et al. described the same illness in 16 children in Hawaii. Melish and Kawasaki had independently developed the same diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which are still used today to make the diagnosis of classic Kawasaki disease. A question was raised whether the disease only started during the period between 1960 and 1970, but later a preserved heart of a seven-year-old boy who died in 1870 was examined and showed three aneurysms of the coronary arteries with clots, as well as pathologic changes consistent with Kawasaki disease. Kawasaki disease is now recognized worldwide. In the United States and other developed nations, it appears to have replaced acute rheumatic fever as the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children.