Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Complications
By Mayo Clinic staffMost conditions that cause sore throats aren't serious and go away on their own without causing any complications. However, some bacterial and viral infections can lead to other, more serious problems.
Strep throat, a bacterial infection, can trigger other conditions that include:
- Tonsillitis
- Sinus infection (sinusitis)
- Ear infection
- Scarlet fever, an illness characterized by a rash
- Inflammation of the kidney (glomerulonephritis)
- Rheumatic fever, which can damage organs such as the heart
Common signs and symptoms of strep throat include:
- Painful swallowing
- Red and swollen tonsils, sometimes with white patches or streaks of pus
- Tiny red spots on the soft or hard palate — the area at the back of the roof of the mouth
- Swollen, tender lymph glands (nodes) in your neck
- Fever
- Headache
- Rash
- Stomachache and sometimes vomiting, especially in younger children
Mono (infectious mononucleosis) is a viral infection that can lead to complications including:
- Inflammation of the spleen or ruptured spleen
- Liver inflammation (hepatitis)
- Low levels of blood cells involved in clotting (platelets)
- Anemia
- Inflammation of the heart
- Nerve damage, possibly leading to paralysis
- Swollen tonsils, leading to obstructed breathing
Common signs and symptoms of mono include:
- Fatigue
- Weakness
- Sore throat, perhaps strep throat that doesn't get better with antibiotics
- Fever
- Swollen lymph nodes in your neck and armpits
- Swollen tonsils
- Headache
- Skin rash
- Loss of appetite
- Soft, swollen spleen
- Night sweats
