About Kawasaki Disease

Key points

  • Kawasaki disease (KD) can cause heart and blood vessel damage.
  • It occurs mostly in children younger than 5 years old.
  • It affects boys more often than girls.
  • KD symptoms include fever that lasts at least 5 days plus at least 1 other symptom.
  • Most children recover with treatment.
Toddlers at a table
Kawasaki disease primarily affects children younger than 5 years of age.

Overview

Kawasaki disease (KD), also known as Kawasaki syndrome, is a disease that can cause damage to the heart and blood vessels, mostly in children younger than 5 years old. It affects boys more often than girls. The cause of KD is not known.

In the continental United States, it's estimated that KD occurs in 9 to 20 per 100,000 children under 5 years of age.

In 2019, there were more than 5,000 children under 18 years of age who were hospitalized with KD in the United States. Of these children, 3,693 were under 5 years of age; this means there was a hospitalization rate of 18.9 per 100,000 children in that age group.

There are reports of illnesses that look like Kawasaki disease after infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). This is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Please visit the CDC MIS-C website for more information.

Signs and symptoms

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Illustration of Kawasaki Disease signs and symptoms, including red eyes, strawberry tongue, rash, fever, swollen lymph nodes, and red and swollen hands and feet
Kawasaki Disease signs and symptoms

Children with KD have a fever that typically lasts for 5 days or longer. They may also have some or all of the following symptoms:

  • Rash
  • Swelling and redness of their hands and feet
  • Irritation and redness of the whites of their eyes
  • Swollen lymph glands in their neck
  • Irritation and inflammation of their mouth, lips, and throat

KD can cause serious complications, including swelling of parts of the heart and other blood vessels. When this happens, the heart doesn't work as well to pump blood to the body and could burst (coronary artery dilation and aneurysms).

Surveillance and reporting for healthcare professionals

For epidemiologic surveillance, CDC defines a case of KD as illness in a patient with fever that lasts 5 or more days (or fever until the intravenous immunoglobulin is given, if given before the fifth day of fever), and having at least 4 of the following 5 clinical signs:

  • Rash
  • Cervical lymphadenopathy (at least 15 cm in diameter)
  • Bilateral conjunctival injection
  • Oral mucosal changes

Patients whose illness does not meet the above KD case definition but have fever and coronary artery abnormalities are classified as having atypical or incomplete KD.

The CDC standardized KD case report form is available as a PDF document for healthcare workers to submit a report. If you are a healthcare professional and wish to submit a report, you can either print the form and fill it out by hand or fill it out electronically and print it out. The completed form should be sent to the mailing address provided on the form or sent by fax to 404-471-8768.

Treatment and recovery

Treatment for KD is available, and it must be given at the hospital. It typically combines a mixture of antibodies given through your veins (intravenous immunoglobulin) and aspirin. The treatment can help make symptoms less severe and reduce the risk of serious complications. Healthcare professionals may recommend additional treatments.

Most children recover with proper treatment.

What CDC is doing

Kawasaki disease was first described in 1967 in Japan by Tomisaku Kawasaki. The first cases outside of Japan were reported in 1976 in Hawaii. CDC has operated a KD surveillance system since 1976 and uses several data sources to track and better understand KD in the United States.

CDC analyzes large hospital discharge databases in the United States to learn more about the number of cases of KD and what symptoms children are having. Because most children with KD are hospitalized, the hospitalization rate is a good estimate of how often KD is being diagnosed.

CDC also has a voluntary KD reporting system for health care providers and health authorities to let CDC know when and where they are seeing cases. This system provides CDC with information like case symptoms and whether the child is experiencing serious complications.

CDC continues to conduct special studies to further describe how often KD is diagnosed and which symptoms are most common.

Resources

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Content Source:
National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID); About Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology
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