Major Acute Diseases

Acute disease 

This topic is discussed in the following articles:

Alcoholism

Alcoholism: Acute diseasesAlcohol intoxication produces a wide variety of disturbances of neuromuscular and mental functions and of body chemistry. In addition, the intoxicated person is more liable to accidents and injuries. Alcoholics—who chronically experience severe intoxication—are said to be 30 times more liable to fatal poisoning, 16 times more liable to death from a fall, and 4.5 times more liable to...

Bronchitis

Bronchitis...of the mucosa and excess mucus production. Inflammation can be caused by a sudden and rapid attack by infectious, physical, or chemical agents, resulting usually in a relatively brief disease called acute bronchitis, or it can take the form of a long-standing, repetitive condition, called chronic bronchitis, that results in protracted and often permanent damage to the bronchial mucosa.

Leukemia

Leukemias are defined as either acute or chronic and as either myelogenous (from bone marrow) or lymphocytic (involving lymphocytes). These characteristics are used to designate almost all cases as one of four types—acute myelogenous, acute lymphocytic, chronic myelogenous, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acute leukemias affect immature cells; the disease develops rapidly, with symptoms...

Blood disease: Leukemia...

There are two main varieties of leukemia: myelogenous, or granulocytic, and lymphocytic. These terms refer to the types of cell that are involved. Each of these types is further subdivided into acute and chronic categories, referring to the duration of the untreated disease. Before the advent of modern chemotherapy, patients with acute leukemia usually died within weeks or months of the...

Mastitis

Mastitis inflammation of the breast in women or of the udder in sheep, swine, and cattle. Acute mastitis in women is a sudden infectious inflammation caused usually by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, or sometimes by streptococcus organisms. It begins almost exclusively during the first three weeks of nursing and is limited to the period of lactation (milk production). The bacterial...

Otitis media

Ear disease: Acute middle-ear infectionFortunately, acute middle-ear infections, called acute otitis media, are nearly always due to microorganisms that respond quickly to antibiotics. As a result, acute infection of the mastoid air cells resulting in a dangerous mastoid abscess with the possibility of meningitis, brain abscess, septicemia, infection of the labyrinth, or facial nerve paralysis, complicating an acute infection of the...

progression of symptomsHuman disease:

Disease: signs and symptomsAn acute disease process usually begins abruptly and is over soon. Acute appendicitis, for example, is characterized by the sudden onset of nausea, vomiting, and pain usually localized in the lower right side of the abdomen. It usually requires immediate surgical treatment. The term chronic refers to a process that often begins very gradually and then persists over a long period. For example,...