If you suffer from angular cheilitis, you will have red welts at the corners of your mouth. In fact angular stands for the corner of your mouth and cheilitis stands for welts or lesions. This short article will go over what you need to do to be able to cure your angular cheilitis so you can start living life normally again (no more watching what you eat or worrying about opening your mouth too wide).
First off, there are lots of rumors going around (especially on the internet) about what causes angular cheilitis and how to cure it. First off, angular stomatitis is not caused by a vitamin deficiency. This was what people believed a few decades ago, but it has recently been shown that it is not the cause of cracked lip corners.
So what does cause angular cheilitis then? The main cause is constant moisture from your mouth coming in contact with dry, injured, or weak mouth corners. When this happens the bacteria in your saliva get into the skin folds on the corner of your mouth and cause inflammation and irritation. Eventually your mouth will begin to turn red and your lip corners will blister and may even split.
At this point, you may think that your lips are simply chapped and that adding Chap Stick to your lips will solve the problem. Unfortunately, Chap Stick will not kill the bacteria which is causing the lip irritation. When your lip corners split (and they usually do) you will try putting antibiotic ointments on it such as Neosporin and triple-antibiotic ointment. Unfortunately, these will not kill the fungus and bacteria and will not cure or heal your lips.
The only way you can get rid of your angular stomatitis is to kill the fungus and bacteria which is preventing your lips from healing naturally. Your lips and mouth are actually one of the fastest healing parts of your body so once you do get rid of the bacteria you will be able to see a significant change fairly quickly. Which is good, because walking around with cracked lip corners can be fairly embarrassing because most people will assume you have either cold sores or extremely chapped lips due to poor hygiene.
Hopefully this article will help answer any questions you have about angular cheilitis including how to treat it and what not to do if you find that you are suffering from it.