This article was originally created by the editorial department of 160 Health Research Institute (WX: ZX91160)
Hello everyone, I am the director.
The temperature has changed a lot recently, and many friends in the institute have been shot and captured by colds. The first person to be affected was the little assistant, who had fever, cough, runny nose, and they all lived together.
What's more terrible is that she can't even speak. The little assistant thought it was a cold, so he took cold medicine for several days, but the situation became more and more serious, his throat was swollen and painful, and he even had difficulty swallowing, and even drinking water was painful.
opened his mouth and saw that it was true that the tonsils were inflamed and he hurried to the hospital. Strike while the iron is hot, today's "interesting talk about all diseases", let's talk about this disease that looks like a "cold" - tonsillitis . What is
tonsils?
The tonsils in our concept are the thing that the doctor asks you to open your mouth and use a flashlight to look at when you have a cold or fever.
In fact, tonsils are a big family, including pharyngeal tonsils (adenosoids), palatal tonsils, eustachian tube tonsils and lingual tonsils . Today we will mainly talk about "palatine tonsils", which is the one you can see in the flashlight.
tonsils, as the name suggests, look like flat peach pits. It grows at the intersection of our digestive tract and respiratory tract. The mucosa contains a large amount of lymphatic tissue, which will cause a local immune response to the antigen . belongs to the immune organ .
To put it bluntly, tonsils are ground staff members, responsible for local security checks in and out of the esophagus and trachea. Whenever there are bacteria and viruses that harm the human body want to get away with it, the tonsils will take action and pick them out and filter them and eliminate them.
Why do tonsils get inflammation?
Someone may ask: "Aren't tonsils immune organs? How can they get inflammation?"
I introduced in an article about antibiotics before that inflammatory reaction is a natural reaction produced by the human body when the immune system is at a disadvantage in fighting the virus
Because the oropharyngeal environment is relatively complex, the tonsils need to be exposed to a large amount of food and gas. The pits of the tonsils are like grooves in the teeth, which are easy to hide dirt.
Once we are in a state of fatigue, cold, and sub-healthy , our body's resistance is relatively weakened, and the defense function of tonsils will be greatly reduced. When a large number of bacteria and viruses invade, the tonsils are naturally the first to be affected and are captured by the invaders.
Tonsill inflammation, the most typical symptom is sore throat.
How painful does it hurt? Perhaps one lyric can express:
Tonsill inflammation is a pain that causes breathing. It is hidden in every corner of my body. It hurts if I can’t speak, it hurts when I eat, and even if I swallow my saliva!
pair, just like two fingers that have done manicure twist your throat with their fingertips and feel it. This is not the most uncomfortable. Tonsill inflammation is usually accompanied by headaches, fevers and chills (that is, colds) symptoms of . This is also a difficult part of the difference between catching a cold.
tonsillitis can be divided into viral tonsillitis and bacterial tonsillitis according to pathogens. How to distinguish between
?
mainly depends on symptoms. Viral cold symptoms are usually caused by moderate and low fever, which are often accompanied by diarrhea, nasal congestion, runny nose, cough and hoarseness.
, bacterial fever, and it also causes headache, sore throat , abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting.
The former is relatively common and there is no high-incidence season, which means that each season is a high-incidence season, and the infectivity is related to pathogens, and the strength and weakness vary. The latter occurs most often in winter and spring, and is very contagious and can be transmitted through the air.
To sum up, no matter what kind of tonsillitis it is, it is contagious. However, viral tonsillitis is a self-limiting disease and can heal itself in about a week. Bacterial tonsillitis is generally difficult to heal itself and will not disappear with the recovery of the body's resistance.
Therefore, once symptoms of sore throat and high fever appear, it is recommended to seek medical treatment immediately. After taking antibiotics, you can recover from in about 10 days.
What else can tonsils do besides inflammation?
In addition to inflammation, tonsils certainly have other effects - affects appearance .
When it comes to factors that affect appearance, many people will think of teeth, masseter muscles and cheekbones. But in fact, the shape of tonsils will also affect the child's appearance. (The "tonsils" mentioned here refer to pharyngeal tonsils and palatal tonsils.)
As mentioned above, tonsils control the food and gases coming and going, and their position is very critical. Normally, tonsils do not affect our breathing, and we naturally exchange gases through our noses that the body needs.
However, once the tonsils are infected with bacteria and viruses, they will become inflamed and become swollen and hypertrophy. At this time, the channel where originally received gas has narrowed accordingly. In order to survive, the human body will automatically mobilize the oral route to replenish the oxygen needed. To put it bluntly, it means going from nasal breathing to oral breathing. What are the effects of
oral breathing?
- affects appearance : atrophy of the nose, thick lips, tilts, retraction of the chin, irregular teeth
- affects oral function : changes in dental arch, decreased chewing function, a lot of water loss in the oral mucosa, easy to get oral ulcers and other diseases
- affects respiratory function : damage to the alveolar tissue, decreased respiratory function, and air has not passed through the nasal cavity, which can easily induce respiratory diseases.
Clinically, facial features caused by hypertrophy of tonsils (agendoids, palatine tonsils) are called adenoid hypertrophy.
If the child snored while sleeping, opened his mouth habitually, restless sleep, and sweating, it may be caused by oral breathing, and he needs to go to the ENT department as soon as possible. If you do not have any special symptoms, you can also guide your normal breathing appropriately.
In addition, tonsil hypertrophy will affect the development of the mandible.
Some children have grown up to be full of things since childhood, and mothers will feel that their posture is wrong when they are breastfeeding.
is not the case. The oropharyngeal respiratory tract narrowing caused by tonsil hypertrophy, forces the mandible to extend forward to improve ventilation, which will lead to excessive growth of the mandible and form a bone-encapsulated area.
Under what circumstances will the tonsils become hypertrophy?
develops or becomes inflamed.
After birth, the tonsils of infants and young children will gradually develop with age, and physiological tonsil hypertrophy may occur in childhood . The palatal tonsils gradually grow at the age of 1, reach their peak development at 4 to 10, and gradually degenerate at the age of 14 to 15.
When inflammation occurs, the tonsils will become red and swollen; after recovery, the tonsils will return to normal. But if the pathogen is not completely removed and acute tonsillitis recurs, it will easily evolve into chronic tonsillitis.
Like chronic pharyngitis, you don’t feel obvious. But the swollen tonsils will always interfere with your life until they completely deteriorate and be removed.
Why do children prone to tonsillitis?
tonsils are immune organs, but they are just "nine-rank sesame officials".
It has been around since we were born, and the younger we are, the stronger our resistance is. This does not mean that the tonsils have strong immune capacity, but because other organs in the immune system are not fully developed, tonsils are very important to children.
In other words, the immune function of tonsils is mainly aimed at children. After we are 6-8 years old, the development of other immune systems in the body has gradually improved, and the immune function of tonsils will also be replaced.
The importance of tonsils is proportional to the degree of inflammation.
For adults, even without tonsils, other organs in the immune system can supplement its functions and resist bacteria and viruses.
For children, they have weak resistance. The small organ of tonsils has too many enemies to deal with. Children are inevitably suffering from flu, wind and cold, and at this time, the tonsils are even busier and can only stop eating.
However, it is worth noting that tonsillitis recurs and occurs more than 4 times a year, and there is a risk of developing chronic tonsillitis .
Chronic tonsillitis not only causes infection in adjacent organs, leading to otitis media, sinusitis, larynx, trachea, bronchitis, etc.; it also causes bacterial toxins to spread throughout the body through the blood vessel network around the glandular fossa, producing "super bacteria" to other organs far away from the tonsils, such as the heart, kidneys, and joints.
Therefore, tonsils are also the lesions of many systemic diseases of such as rheumatoid fever, myocarditis, nephritis, , etc.
When the child has symptoms of tonsillitis, do not take medicine blindly. Be sure to find out the cause and completely remove the antigen. Drug reuse will only cause the condition to worsen. Not only will it not drive away the inflammation, it will also form "lesions" and cause a series of sequelae.
Is there any way to cure tonsillitis?
cut off.
Tonsillectomy is a common procedure in the otolaryngology department, just like the removal of the appendix and the cecum. : The tonsils are not bad for adults who have adults, but not all tonsillitis need to be removed. After all, it is better to have them than not.
Under what circumstances is it recommended to remove tonsils?
First, acute tonsillitis recurs on , with the frequency of 3-5 times within 1 year, and even more. To avoid worsening into chronic tonsillitis, which can lead to a series of complications, doctors generally recommend resection.
The second is tonsill hypertrophy , which causes obstructive sleep apnea hypoventilation syndrome (OSAHS), affecting sleep and swallowing.
is the benign and malignant tumor of tonsils . That’s right, the adverse prognosis of repeated inflammation of tonsils is tonsill cancer. It includes papilloma, keratosis, and lymphoma.
Since tonsillitis occurs frequently all seasons, is there a way to prevent it?
Wash your hands frequently, ventilate more
Sneeze, cover your mouth and nose
More fruits and vegetables, less snacks
Love exercise, grow your body
