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 diagnostic indications 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 BJ, Sadock VA (2008). Kaplan & Sadock's Concise Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. ISBN 978-0-7817-8746-8. Archived from the original on 6 January 2023. Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  2. ^ "Beyond Intuition: Quantifying and Understanding the Signs and Symptoms of Fever". clinicaltrials.gov. 5 October 2017. Archived from the original on 13 February 2022. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
  3. ^ "Symptoms and self-help guides by body part". NHS inform. Archived from the original on 13 February 2022. Retrieved 9 January 2021.