Kawasaki Disease - History

History

The disease was first reported by Tomisaku Kawasaki in a four-year-old child with a rash and fever at the Red Cross Hospital in Tokyo, Japan in January 1961, and later published a report on 50 similar cases. Later Kawasaki and colleagues were persuaded that there is definite cardiac involvement when they studied and reported 23 cases, of which 11(48%) patients had abnormalities detected by an electrocardiogram. It was not until 1974 that the first description of this disorder was published in the English language literature. in the year 1976 Melish et al., described the same illness in 16 children in Hawaii. Melish and Kawasaki had independently developed the same diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which are still used today to make the diagnosis of classic KD.

A question was raised whether the disease only started during the period between 1960 and 1970, but later a preserved heart of a 7 year old boy who died in 1870 was examined and showed three aneurysms of the coronary arteries with clots, as well as pathologic changes consistent with KD. KD is now recognized worldwide. In the United States and other developed nations, it appears to have replaced acute rheumatic fever as the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children.