What is FAPA? It's a fairly rare health condition in children, but that's all I know. Not sure on spelling.

Question

My best friend's 20 month-old was diagnosed with this condition after several months of running fevers of 104 to 105 degrees daily. She was tested for leukemia among other things. They said that it usually resolved by removing the tonsils and adenoids. I'm just not sure of what the condition actually is or is actually called. There are apparently 4 or 5 symptoms involved, but they never occur at the same time. The only one that I am aware of is a very high fever.

Answer 1

Taylor

What you are thinking about is PFAPA - an acronym for "Periodic Fever, Aphthous Stomatitis, Pharyngitis, and Cervical Adenitis".

http://www.thedoctorsdoctor.com/diseases/pfapa.htm

There is a good discussion of PFAPA at the bottom of this page (ignore the other periodic fever syndromes).
http://www.clevelandclinic.org/arthritis/treat/facts/periodic_fever.htm

This is a very technical description.
http://www.orpha.net/data/patho/GB/uk-PFAPA.pdf

Here is an abstract of a study looking at the effectiveness of tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy on children suffering from PFAPA.
http://www.medscape.com/medline/abstract/10979131?prt=true

Do a Yahoo! or Google search on PFAPA, with appropriate terms like pediatrics, tonsils, etc., and you will find numerous references.

I hope this is helpful.

Answer 2

FAPA as far as I know.. has nothing to do with health. FPA is the Family Planning Association.. the only thing close to health.

Tonsils and adenoids.. usually they test for mononucleosis, strep, tonsillitis. I can't think of any others that involve the tonsils.

The only thing I can think of where they would remove the tonsils and adenoids would be tonsillitis. Usually feverish symptoms come along with it. I aint no health care professional., but that's my best guess. And I'm not aware of any other name for it.