Eli5: what’s the difference between a syndrome, a disease, and an infection?
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A syndrome is a collection of symptoms that occur together.
A disease is a particular condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism.
A subset of a disease caused by an organism.
disease is anything that makes you feel sick
infection is a disease that can spread from one person to another. Diabetes and heart disease are not infections, you get them from unhealthy lifestyle. Allergies are not infections either, you are born with them, or maybe get them from environment that is a bit too clean.
Syndrome is a disease that we have not figured out yet. It is a collection of symptoms that happen together in many people, but we do not know what causes them. AIDS has S for syndrome, they noticed that there are people who suddenly lost their immune function. Later, they found that it is caused by HIV, which is a virus, and an infection. Now AIDS is a well-understood disease, but the name stuck. A syndrome can also be causes by combination of diseases, or some chemicals, or life experiences.
A syndrome is a collection of symptoms that occur together. If, for example, you noticed that people in a certain area often got a cough, warts on their knees, and purple hair at the same time, you might term that condition /u/delighteddreamer’s syndrome.
A disease, if you’re distinguishing it from a syndrome, is a harmful syndrome together with a cause for that syndrome. Some syndromes can have multiple causes that end up creating the same symptom set.
An infection is the harmful invasion of the body by living things that are not supposed to be inside the body, or that are not supposed to be in a particular part of the body, or that are not supposed to multiply as much as they have. Infections are a type of disease. Most infections are *transmissible* to some extent: they can be passed from one person to another. Infections are usually caused by bacteria or viruses, but can also be caused by fungi, animal parasites, or even individual proteins in rare cases. A zit is a minor bacterial infection, COVID is a severe viral infection, a yeast infection is a minor fungal infection, and tapeworms are a moderate parasitic infection.
An infection is an invasion by a foreign creature (pathogen), most often bacteria or virus, but it can be fungal or parasitic.
A disease is a dysfunction of a structure or system in the body. It may be caused by your own body (autoimmune) or it may be due to an infection: for example Meningitis is a disease that affects the lining of the spinal cord and brain and can be caused by an infection of bacteria, viruses or fungi.
A syndrome is a group of symptoms, but sometimes you don’t know what’s causing it. For example, with AIDS, it was Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome because they had no idea why the immune system was dying. They later learned it was an infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but kept the name.
Sometimes a syndrome is group of symptoms that may be present in multiple diseases, for example Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) is a complication that may come from a crush injury, COVID, pneumonia, Hantavirus infection etc….many diseases, same symptoms.
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