Symptom

Individual body morphological, physiological, or psychological feature (sign) indicating a disturbance, pathological condition, or disease in the body. It can be a specific complaint of the patient about their body. Examples of symptoms are headaches, rashes, nausea, dizziness, etc. Some symptoms can be caused by a wide variety of different diseases (e.g., dizziness), while others may be caused by only a few diseases (e.g., blindness in the left visual field). Sometimes, when the cause of a symptom is unknown and the underlying disease cannot be identified, the syndrome itself is often referred to as an idiopathic syndrome and classified as a separate disease, which can be called, for example, “idiopathic headache.” Often, several symptoms occur together, and such a complex of symptoms is called a symptom complex or syndrome. For example, the flu syndrome, typical of certain infectious diseases, consists of headaches, muscle pain, and elevated temperature.

Source | Glossary of Most Commonly Used Biomedical Terms and Concepts | Lithuanian University of Health Sciences | Academician Professor Antanas Praškevičius, Professor Laima Ivanovienė