Kawasaki disease is an acute, self-limited vasculitis of infants and children characterized by prolonged fever unresponsive to antibiotics, polymorphous skin rash, erythema of the oral mucosa, lips, and tongue, erythema of the palms and soles, bilateral conjunctival injection, and cervical lymphadenopathy (Kawasaki, 1967). Coronary artery aneurysms develop in 15 to 25% of those left untreated (Kato et al., 1975, 1996), making Kawasaki disease the leading cause of acquired heart disease among children in developed countries. Treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) abrogates the inflammation in approximately 80% of affected individuals and reduces the aneurysm rate to less than 5%. Cardiac sequelae of the aneurysms include ischemic heart disease, myocardial infarction, and sudden death. Epidemiologic features such as seasonality and clustering of cases suggested an infectious trigger, although no pathogen had been isolated. Several lines of evidence suggested the importance of genetic factors in disease susceptibility and outcome. First, the incidence of Kawasaki disease is 10 to 20 times higher in Japan than in Western countries (Cook et al., 1989). Second, the risk of Kawasaki disease in sibs of affected children is 10 times higher than in the general population, and the incidence of Kawasaki disease in children born to parents with a history of Kawasaki disease is twice as high as that in the general population (Fujita et al., 1989; Uehara et al., 2003).
Hata and Onouchi (2009) reviewed current knowledge on Kawasaki disease, including epidemiology, genomewide linkage analysis, and molecular genetics. [from
OMIM]