Symptoms

Yellow-tinted skin and eyes characterize jaundice. In more severe cases, the whites of your eyes may turn brown or orange. You may also have dark urine and pale stools.

If an underlying health condition such as viral hepatitis is to blame for jaundice, you might experience other symptoms, including excessive fatigue and vomiting.

Some people misdiagnose themselves when they experience yellow skin. People who have jaundice usually have both yellow-coloured skin and yellow-coloured eyes.

Diagnosis

If you only have yellow skin, it may be due to having too much beta carotene in your system. Beta carotene is an antioxidant found in foods such as carrots, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes. An excess of this antioxidant is not a cause of jaundice. Your healthcare provider will first conduct blood tests to determine the cause of your jaundice. A blood test can not only determine the total amount of bilirubin in your body but also help detect indicators of other diseases such as hepatitis.

Other diagnostic tests may be used, including:

• liver function tests, a series of blood tests that measure levels of certain proteins and enzymes the liver produces when it is healthy and when it is damaged
• complete blood count (CBC), to see if you have any evidence of hemolytic anaemia
• imaging studies, which may include abdominal ultrasounds (using high-frequency sound waves to generate images of your internal organs) or CT scans
• liver biopsies, which involves removing small samples of liver tissue for testing and microscopic examination

The severity of jaundice in newborns is generally diagnosed with a blood test. A small blood sample is taken by pricking the infant’s toe. Your paediatrician will recommend treatment if the results indicate moderate to severe jaundice.

Causes

Old red blood cells travel to your liver, where they are broken down. Bilirubin is the yellow pigment formed by the breakdown of these old cells. Jaundice occurs when your liver does not metabolize bilirubin the way it is supposed to.

Your liver might be damaged and unable to perform this process. Sometimes the bilirubin simply cannot make it to your digestive tract, where it normally would be removed through your stool. In other cases, there may be too much bilirubin trying to enter the liver at once or too many red blood cells dying at one time.

Jaundice in adults is indicative of:

• alcohol misuse
• liver cancer
• thalassemia
• cirrhosis (scarring of the liver, usually due to alcohol)
• gallstones (cholesterol stones made of hardened fat material or pigment stones made of bilirubin)
• hepatitis A
• hepatitis B
• hepatitis C
• hepatitis D
• hepatitis E
• pancreatic cancer
• G6PD deficiency
• biliary (bile duct) obstruction
• sickle cell anaemia
• acute pancreatitis
• ABO incompatibility reaction
• drug-induced immune hemolytic anaemia
• yellow fever
• Weil’s disease
• other blood disorders such as hemolytic anaemia (the rupture or destruction of red blood cells that leads to a decreased number of red blood cells in your circulation, which results in fatigue and weakness)
• an adverse reaction to or overdose of a medication, such as acetaminophen (Tylenol)

Jaundice is also a frequent occurrence in newborns, especially in babies who are born prematurely. An excess of bilirubin may develop in newborns because their livers have not fully developed yet. This condition is known as breast milk jaundice. 

Again, jaundice itself is not a disease but a symptom of several possible underlying illnesses. The type of treatment your healthcare provider recommends for jaundice depends on its cause. Your healthcare provider will treat the cause of jaundice, not the symptom itself. Once treatment begins, your yellow skin will likely return to its normal state.

According to the American Liver Foundation, most jaundice cases in infants resolve within one to two weeks.

Moderate jaundice is typically treated with phototherapy in the hospital or in the home to help remove excess bilirubin.

The light waves used in phototherapy are absorbed by your baby’s skin and blood. The light helps your baby’s body change the bilirubin into waste products to be eliminated. Frequent bowel movements with greenish stools are a common side effect of this therapy. This is just the bilirubin exiting the body. Phototherapy may involve the use of a lighted pad, which mimics natural sunlight and is placed on your baby’s skin.

Severe cases of jaundice are treated with blood transfusions to remove bilirubin.

Jaundice usually clears up when the underlying cause is treated. The outlook depends on your overall condition. See your healthcare provider right away as jaundice may be a sign of a serious illness. Mild cases of jaundice in newborns tend to go away on their own without treatment and cause no lasting liver issues.