Tetanus symptoms, these points should not be ignored!

Tetanus is an extremely harmful disease. The incubation period of the disease is about 1-2 weeks. After that, the patient will experience symptoms such as general discomfort and muscle aches. In severe cases, it may also show high fever, sweating, tachycardia, etc.

The vast majority of tetanus patients have a history of trauma, and the wounds often have or are complicated by purulent infection. The wounds are generally deep and often contain foreign matter and necrotic tissue residues. The wounds of some patients are small and hidden, which are often ignored by patients, resulting in delayed diagnosis and treatment, and even serious consequences due to the progression of the disease.

The incubation period is 1 to 2 weeks and can be up to several months. The shorter the incubation period, the more severe the disease. Cases with a period of less than 1 week are mostly severe tetanus. The incubation period is generally longer for those who have been automatically immunized with tetanus toxoid or received preventive tetanus antitoxin injection after injury.

Early symptoms include general discomfort, muscle aches, etc. Difficulty in opening the mouth due to masseter muscle spasms is the earliest typical symptom. Other characteristic clinical manifestations are persistent generalized hypertonia followed by paroxysmal tonic muscle spasms. The patient is conscious, but when the disease progresses and paroxysmal tonic muscle spasms occur, the patient is in great pain, and often a very slight stimulation can cause a painful spasm.

The time from the onset of increased muscle tone to the first onset of myotonic spasm is called the initial spasm period. If the initial spasm period is shorter than 48 hours, it indicates that the condition is more serious. The progression of the disease is manifested in shorter intervals between spasms and longer durations. If the laryngeal and respiratory muscles are in persistent spasm and cannot be relieved, the patient may die immediately from suffocation. Muscle rigidity in various parts of the body causes the characteristic clinical manifestations of tetanus patients, such as spasmodic smile, dysphagia, neck rigidity, opisthotonos, abdominal muscle rigidity and limb stiffness. More serious cases often have symptoms of sympathetic nervous system overexcitation, such as high fever, sweating, tachycardia, etc. High fever is one of the important signs of poor prognosis in tetanus patients.