Kanavel's cardinal signs

Kanavel's sign is a clinical sign found in patients with infection of a flexor tendon sheath in the hand (flexor tenosynovitis), a serious condition which can cause rapid loss of function of the affected finger.^[1]

Kanavel's cardinal signs
Differential diagnosis	flexor tendon sheath infection

The sign consists of four components:^[2]

1. the affected finger is held in slight flexion.
2. there is fusiform swelling over the affected tendon.
3. there is tenderness over the affected tendon.
4. there is pain on passive extension of the affected finger.

The sign is named after Allen B. Kanavel who first named them in 1912. 

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.