Symptoms

Creamy white lesions on your tongue, inner cheeks, and sometimes on the roof of your mouth, gums and tonsils
Slightly raised lesions with a cottage cheese-like appearance
Redness, burning or soreness that may be severe enough to cause difficulty eating or swallowing
Slight bleeding if the lesions are rubbed or scraped
Cracking and redness at the corners of your mouth
A cottony feeling in your mouth
Loss of taste
Redness, irritation and pain under dentures (denture stomatitis)

What To Expect

The classic symptom of oral thrush is a strongly reddened mucous membrane of the mouth, on which white spots lie. In the beginning, these spots look like small, milky white speckles, often on the inside of the cheeks and lips, but also on the palate or under the tongue (tongue fungus). These small spots are usually easy to wipe off, and a red, shiny spot appears under them. Especially often the fungi nest in the mouth also under a dental prosthesis. In the further course of time, the spots multiply and enlarge and sometimes merge into larger white spots. If these are removed, the skin underneath begins to bleed easily. Sometimes the mouth fungus spreads to the throat and the esophagus.

Made Worse By

There are a number of measures you can take to prevent oral thrush in your child and yourself. Hygiene is particularly important for babies and small children to prevent oral thrush. Clean pacifiers, teats and biting toys regularly and avoid "cleaning" e.g. dropped pacifiers with your own saliva. If you have an immunodeficiency and constantly develop thrush in your mouth, it can be useful to use an antimycotic daily as a preventive measure. In any case, discuss this with your doctor. A vaginal fungus can be transmitted from mother to baby at birth and can manifest itself as oral thrush in the newborn. If you are pregnant, treatment of a possible candida infection before birth is definitely advisable.

How Common

Studies have shown that Candida infections have increased over the last ten to twenty years, with a very often fluid transition from a still harmless to a symptomatic infection. In babies, Candida fungi were detected in about 22 to 24 percent of all those examined in the first two months, with 95 percent of the babies showing symptoms of a mouth infection. A very frequent occurrence of oral thrush also occurs in caries, in wearers of dentures, but also in various underlying diseases.

Diagnosed By

The diagnosis of oral thrush can be made by a dentist, a pediatrician, a dermatologist or a general practitioner. First he asks the person affected (or, in the case of babies, the respective caregiver) which symptoms he has noticed and how long they have existed. He also asks about existing previous illnesses and would like to know whether the patient is taking medication.