VIDEO: Recognizing symptoms that may point to vasculitis

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Vasculitis refers to a group of inflammatory diseases that cause inflammation that is centered in the walls of the blood vessels. So, this vascular inflammation ultimately leads to damage and dysfunction of the organs that contain these blood vessels. And there are several types of vasculitis and most of them are rare. Vasculitis can affect one single organ, or it can affect multiple organs. So, the symptoms of vasculitis really depend on what organs are affected. Some of the general symptoms of vasculitis include fever, weight loss, fatigue, and generalized aches and pains. The other symptoms depend really on what organs are affected. For example, if the lungs are affected by vasculitis, one might experience shortness of breath, or they may be having cough or even coughing of blood. If the eyes are affected, they may be experiencing red eyes, painful eyes, and sometimes loss of vision. If skin is affected, they might notice some red scars under the skin, and if kidneys are affected, sometimes they don't feel anything, and it's only reflected when you do some blood tests and urine tests. The blood test will often reveal that the creatinine levels in the blood are elevated, and the urine test may reveal that there is leakage of protein and blood in the urine. So, these are the common signs and symptoms that should make one think about a diagnosis of vasculitis.