Question: What causes feeling of hair on tongue? Sometimes it feels like hair on tongue?
Answer There is no specific reason for such a feeling of hair on the tongue. It is often felt by many persons, may be due to lack of vitamins or bad oral hygiene.
But our tongue can appear hairy due to certain reasons which we will elaborate below.
Our tongue is made up of tiny filliform papillae. Bacteria and yeast in the mouth gets deposited on the tiny papillae, instead of shedding as they normally do the papillae start to grow and lengthen creating hair like projection.
Papillae are normally pink but as they grow, pigments of food, drinks, and bacteria and yeast themselves get entangled in the papillae giving a color to the tongue like yellow or black or green.
Causes Of Feeling Hair On Tongue
Certain causes can be responsible for appearance of hairy tongue:
- Poor oral hygiene
- Smoking tobacco
- Drinking excess of coffee and tea.
- Dry tongue.
- Using mouth wash containing peroxide, and menthol.
- Antibiotics which disrupt the bacterial flora of the mouth.
- Radiation therapy mainly to the head and neck areas.
Symptoms Of Hair On Tongue Feeling
No specific symptoms are perceived in hairy appearance of the tongue, except few people can complain of burning sensation if there is too much growth of candida albicans yeast.
Treatment For Hair On Tongue Feeling
Ways to treat the hairy appearance on the tongue:
- Maintain proper oral hygiene.
- Brush your teeth gently with a soft toothbrush.
- Use a tongue scraper to clean the tongue, also you can brush your tongue.
- Drink plenty of water so to keep your mouth clean
- Quit smoking, excess of tea and coffee.
- Add roughage in your diet as soft food will not be able to clean the tongue effectively.