Reply to Dr AMIT MUNJAL's Post: I wanted your exper advise as an MD, all I got from you was a cut a paste from a web site
"After taking oral antibiotics many people, develop glossitis, an inflamed and painful tongue. The mouth can also be affected and white patches, small blisters and ulcers may appear on either or both tongue and mouth. Antibiotics alter the normal mouth flora and as a result, fungal organisms, including the prolific and ubiquitous candida, can burgeon out of control."
I found this: The Times April 27, 2006
Unless you are Thomas Stuttaford, you just went to a web site and took his words. All you did was to copy the third paragraph!
Are my child's mouth ulcers caused by a reaction to antibiotics?
Dr Thomas Stuttaford
A mother with three children and a near full-time job has e-mailed us about her two-year-old’s attack of mouth blisters. She read the review of The Mommy Brain in times2 last week, in which Sarah Vine described her children as having something similar. Our reader wonders if, in her child’s case, it could have been a reaction to a recently prescribed antibiotic?
Quite apart from the discussion stimulated by Sarah Vine’s analysis of the reasons why women are better at multitasking than men, the mention of her baby’s mouth blisters attracted widespread interest and she received a number of calls about it.
After taking oral antibiotics many people, but especially children as they are more likely to be prescribed an antibiotic suspension, develop glossitis, an inflamed and painful tongue. The mouth can also be affected and white patches, small blisters and ulcers may appear on either or both tongue and mouth. Antibiotics alter the normal mouth flora and as a result, fungal organisms, including the prolific and ubiquitous candida, can burgeon out of control. I suspect that our reader’s two-year-old has had no more than an infection of Candida albicans, also known as thrush or monilia.
Antibiotics may give rise to similar infections on the genital mucosa, or under the breasts in women, or under the foreskin in men. In both sexes, thrush may proliferate in skin creases, in the groin or under the arms.
Babies, young children and the elderly have a less effective immune system than those in the prime of life. The removal of the normal organisms from the mouth and from other damp, poorly oxygenated areas, or a change in a patient’s resistance to disease, especially if the immune system is not well developed or is compromised, will encourage thrush. All age groups may suffer from any of a selection of blood diseases that undermines the immune system. Immunity may also be sorely tested in those who are taking steroids, even if only in anti-asthma inhalers, or if the patient is debilitated by chronic disease or malnutrition.
There are other interesting causes of mouth ulcers in young people and children. Among these are the coxsackieviruses. These may give rise to small epidemics characterised by a fever, mouth blisters and ulcers. Infection with the group A coxsackievirus causes herpangina; the child suffers from a temperature, sore throat, headache, loss of appetite and also neck and abdominal pain and painful limbs. The combination of temperature, limb changes, neck pain and changes in behaviour is worrying to parents because of their very natural fear of meningitis. There is no specific treatment for herpangina.
Another coxsackievirus infection is with the virus A16. This nearly always occurs in epidemics in young children and can be distinguished from herpangina as the blisters and ulcers appear not only on the mouth but also on the hands and feet and occasionally on the groin. As with herpangina the treatment is non specific and depends on the symptoms.
Sarah Vine’s musings about the change in women’s intellectual capacity after childbirth is also interesting. It is possible that multitasked women develop parts of the brain involved in their multitude of tasks, just as taxi drivers develop larger than normal sections of the brain that deal with topography.