Final answer:
Signs of disease are objective and measurable, visible to healthcare professionals, such as a fever. Symptoms are subjective experiences felt by the patient, such as pain. Both signs and symptoms are used to diagnose diseases, but symptoms are harder to measure and require patient input or indirect methods.
Step-by-step explanation:
Difference Between Signs and Symptoms of Disease
The main difference between a sign of disease and symptoms of disease is that signs are objective and measurable indicators observed by healthcare professionals, while symptoms are subjective experiences reported by the patient. Signs of disease include measurable changes in vital signs like body temperature, heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure. For instance, a fever can be objectively measured and hence is a sign of disease. In contrast, symptoms such as nausea, loss of appetite, and pain are felt by the patient but cannot be objectively quantified in the same way.
Health professionals often quantify symptoms to better understand them, as seen with the Wong-Baker Faces pain-rating scale, which asks patients to rate their pain on a scale of 0-10. Symptoms can sometimes be quantified indirectly, such as through measuring skin conductance fluctuations as a response to the stressor of pain. However, unlike signs, the presence of symptoms alone does not give a definitive measure of a disease.
Diseases can manifest through various signs and symptoms, but many diseases share similar ones, making it necessary to employ other diagnostic methods to confirm a disease. A cluster of signs and symptoms that are characteristic of a specific disease is known as a syndrome.