What medicine is the best for children's bad breath?

Bad breath in children is quite common in life, because their gastrointestinal tract is not fully developed. If they have a poor diet, it may cause gastric indigestion, which often leads to gastric reflux and causes bad breath in children. Therefore, parents must strengthen their children's diet, ensure regular diet, try to eat less raw, cold, stimulating and expensive greasy food, and pay attention to oral hygiene.

1. General treatment

If a child has bad breath and sour taste in the morning, it is because of stagnation of milk and food. In this case, you can reduce or skip one meal to help recover your gastrointestinal function. For children's bad breath caused by indigestion, digestive aids and astringent drugs can be used, such as pepsin, multi-enzyme tablets, lactase, tannic acid protein, etc. In severe cases with bacterial infection, antibiotics can be used for treatment. Those with severe vomiting and diarrhea should fast for 12 hours, and then gradually transition to a normal diet starting with sugar water or rice soup. People with severe dehydration should be given fluids promptly.

2. Traditional Chinese Medicine

Children's bad breath can generally be treated with Chinese medicine. Traditional Chinese medicine divides children's bad breath into two categories: damp-heat in the stomach meridian and food accumulation.

(1) Children with damp-heat in the stomach meridian will have a red tongue, yellow tongue coating, bad breath, irritability, and restless sleep. Many children also have dry stools. You can take some heat-clearing and dampness-drying medicine under the guidance of a Chinese medicine practitioner.

(2) Food accumulation type bad breath is more common in children aged 1 to 6 years old and is related to irregular diet and improper feeding. This type of children have long-term loss of appetite, pale face and thinness, but their spirits are normal. The medication is mainly for digestion and stomach.

Causes and classification

1. Causes

(1) Improper feeding causes gastrointestinal dysfunction.

(2) Gastrointestinal inflammation: Infants and young children eat food contaminated by bacteria, which causes gastrointestinal inflammation.

(3) The misuse of antibiotics causes an imbalance in the gastrointestinal flora, in which normal bacteria, such as lactobacilli, are inhibited while miscellaneous bacteria grow and multiply in large numbers.

(4) As the weather gets colder, the body’s resistance decreases and catching a cold can cause indigestion.

2. Classification

(1) Sour taste is the most common type of bad breath in children and is often seen in babies with gastrointestinal dysfunction. In addition, rotten egg smell in children's mouth often indicates indigestion and liver disease. Putrid odor is mostly caused by oral inflammation and poor oral hygiene habits.

(2) The smell of rotten apple is a sign of ketoacidosis. Purulent bad breath is mostly caused by ulcers, erosions, and suppuration in the lesions of diseases such as foreign bodies in the baby's nasal cavity, atrophic rhinitis, sinusitis, purulent tonsillitis, lung abscess, and bronchiectasis. If there is a bloody smell in the child's mouth, it is usually caused by bleeding diseases such as nosebleeds and gastrointestinal bleeding.