Is Acrodynia a New Disease?

00:00 - 14 Oct 2025

Publicity is a potent factor for good in more than one walk of life. Even in such seemingly remote byways as clinical diagnosis and therapy, the heralding of unsuspected facts relating to disease may bring unanticipated benefits. Thus it sometimes happens that accurate description of supposedly rare human abnormalities serves to stimulate the memory of the less critical practitioner and help him recognize the real significance of pathologic entities that he may often have encountered without appreciation of their possible import. The record of a disease syndrome supposed to be novel sometimes elicits evidence that it has long been familiar to physicians who have not suspected its possible larger meaning. This seems to be true of acrodynia, a train of symptoms affecting infants and young children and described with considerable precision a few years ago by Byfield. The clinical features of the disorder are manifold. There are general symptoms, such as anorexia, loss of weight and weakness. Nervous manifestations include hyperirritability, sleeplessness, paresthesia and photophobia. Dermatologic symptoms are especially conspicuous in such forms as hyperhidrosis, miliaria, desquamation, erythema and alopecia. The term acrodynia, referring to the painful extremities, describes one of the most typical symptoms of the complex, although it gives no indications of nutritional or neurologic involvements in the etiology.