Hepatitis is one ailment with many different causes. The liver is not precisely the most understood organ. Symptoms are sometimes absent in the first phase of the disease. These facts contribute to turning hepatitis into an unknown illness for patients and a challenging problem for doctors.
Preventing hepatitis is more than avoiding contact with infected people. Sometimes, infected people can’t pass down the disease, and quarantine is entirely useless. So, if you want to reduce the chance of getting this terrible liver disease, you need to know the basics of how do you get it. Only then would it be possible to know what to do against its prevalence in our population.
What is hepatitis, and how does it feel like?
Hepatitis is the inflammation of the liver. It’s a generic term that includes a multitude of ailments, usually caused by an infectious agent. Hepatitis virus is probably the most common cause, especially in some high-risk regions and individuals. But other non-infectious causes include certain toxins, especially alcohol, and autoimmune disease.
Signs and symptoms of hepatitis are not constant, and the disease can be experienced differently in children and adults and depending on the cause. Some cases of hepatitis remain asymptomatic or display very mild symptoms. They are usually chronic hepatitis and should not be neglected because the ongoing inflammation can cause liver cancer or cirrhosis in the long run.
However, the classic signs and symptoms of hepatitis include jaundice, nausea, abdominal pain, malaise, and changes of coloration in the urine and the stool. The severity of the symptoms depends on the patient and the cause, with added signs and symptoms that often lead the diagnosis.
