What is the reason for a child's yellow tongue?

In the field of traditional Chinese medicine, diseases are usually treated by observing, listening, asking and feeling. When observing the patient's physical condition, the facial features are mainly relied on, and the tongue is a very important part. The patient's physical condition can be understood by observing the tongue's color, shape, and changes in the tongue platform. Many children have yellow tongues, which makes parents very worried. What causes children's yellow tongues?

Yellow tongue coating: It is usually seen in the course of febrile diseases, indicating that the struggle between evil and righteousness is very fierce, the disease has entered the interior, and the evil has turned into heat.

From the perspective of modern medicine, there are roughly the following reasons for the appearance of yellow tongue coating.

First, inflammatory infection

In clinical practice, yellow tongue coating can appear in various acute infectious diseases, such as severe stages of meningococcal meningitis, Japanese encephalitis, leptospirosis, typhoid fever, diphtheria and bacillary dysentery, as well as severe pneumonia, severe hepatitis, intestinal infection, acute pyelonephritis, pelvic inflammatory disease, sepsis caused by staphylococci and streptococci, acute pancreatitis, appendicitis, intestinal obstruction, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, middle or late stages of acute perforation of ulcer, peritonitis, acute cholecystitis, cholelithiasis, biliary ascariasis and urinary tract stones and infection. Because the tongue mucosa of patients with inflammatory infection is prone to inflammatory cell infiltration similar to that of focal infection, the tongue itself also has inflammatory infection, and a large number of bacteria and inflammatory exudates accumulate on the surface of the tongue. The accumulation of inflammatory cells and the rapid proliferation of certain bacteria in the oral flora attach to the elongated filiform papillae of the tongue and turn the tongue coating into yellow.

Second, fever

Someone counted 100 patients with yellow tongue coating, among which 63 had fever symptoms. Among the patients with fever, 23 had high fever above 38.5℃ and 40 had low fever below 38.5℃. The shortest fever lasted only 2 days before yellow tongue coating appeared, so fever and yellow tongue coating are closely related. Because the human body consumes more body fluids when the temperature rises, saliva secretion decreases, and the mouth becomes dry, inflammatory exudates and microorganisms are more likely to stay and multiply on the tongue, causing the tongue coating to turn yellow.

Third, digestive tract dysfunction

Patients with digestive system diseases such as chronic gastritis, ulcer disease, chronic hepatitis, colitis, habitual constipation, indigestion and other gastrointestinal dysfunction may produce sulfides such as sulfur dioxide that overflow along the digestive tract, are adsorbed and deposited by the filiform papillae of the tongue, and cause the tongue coating to turn yellow. In addition, when the digestive function is disordered, the pH value of saliva changes, the acidity increases, and the free hydrogen ions increase, which is conducive to the mutual attraction between the positive ions in the intercellular space and the negative charges on the cell membrane surface, thereby increasing the adhesion between the tongue mucosal cells and facilitating the formation of yellow tongue coating.

If the baby has been fed with milk powder, you can feed him some boiled water between feedings. If the baby grows and develops normally, is energetic, and has normal bowel movements, there is generally no major problem.

This article introduces three specific reasons for yellow tongue coating in children. If your baby has yellow tongue coating, you'd better actively compare these reasons in this article to see where the problem is with your baby's yellow tongue coating. After that, you need to take active conditioning measures. In fact, as long as the child's tongue coating is adjusted, it can quickly return to normal.