What is Itachi's illness?


What was Itachi's mysterious illness? Do you think Tsunade could have cured
it? I'm aware that it is a terminal illness. And when did Itachi get this
illness?




The disease is never named.

This is actually quite common in manga/anime. It's often said that a character
has some disease without the name of the disease ever being stated.

In some cases, the disease may be implied, such as in the case of said
character suddenly being bald, in which case cancer is being implied. This can
give a story some realism

In other cases, no symptoms are given or the symptoms are very generic, so
that it's impossible to determine what disease the character has. This is done
because it means less work on the author's part if they're not familiar with a
disease that has the symptoms they want and means less time has to be spent
developing things that don't have any relevance to the story.

In this case, very little information is given about Itachi's illness other
than that it's terminal. It's likely that the author did this simply because
what Itachi had didn't really matter to the story in any way. The only
important thing is that it forced Itachi to speed up his plan, knowing he
would die.

There is one other thing we know about his disease. According to
[Narutopedia](http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Itachi_Uchiha), this disease had an
effect on Itach's chakra. Because of this, it is reasonable to assume that
this disease either isn't real or it's based on a real disease with this
fictional characteristic attached.

