Mouth Diseases

Burning Mouth SyndromeBurning mouth syndrome is a fairly common disorder. People affected by it experience abnormal sensations of the mouth (burning sensation of the tongue) as well as alterations in taste and mouth texture. It is a poorly understood condition that most commonly affects post-menopausal females.
Although the cause of this disorder is not known, most of the evidence suggests that this is a minor (but annoying) problem with certain nerves (called sensory nerves) that supply information from the oral tissues, especially the tongue, roof of the mouth and lips, to the brain. This "misinformation" includes telling the brain that the mouth (especially the tongue) feels scalded ("burning" sensation), that bad tastes are present, or that the texture of the mouth is wrong (usually a "dry" feeling).

Much less frequently, burning tongue symptoms may be caused by oral yeast infection or certain rare types of anemia and these should be ruled out in order to make a diagnosis for burning mouth syndrome. If yeast infection of the mouth is suspected, it would have to be proven by doing a culture (swab) of the lining of the mouth. If yeast is present, the problem should be easily treated with antifungal medication.
Diagnosis of this condition can sometimes pose a problem because despite the presence of symptoms, when the mouth is examined, everything appears normal. This causes a great deal of confusion for the doctor who is not familiar with this condition. The best person to evaluate this problem would be an oral and maxillofacial pathologist.

There is no medically proven treatment for this condition, and none of the so-called "cures" for burning mouth have been shown to be any better than placebo ("sugar pill"). However, for about half of the people who get this problem, it goes away by itself after a period of time, although the amount of time varies from person to person and is unpredictable.
While it is an annoying condition, burning mouth syndrome typically is not progressive, does not represent a form of cancer, and cannot be transmitted to anyone else.

Mouth Diseases

Mucocele

represents a condition in which damage to one of the small salivary (spit) glands leads to the formation of a soft bump or a blister-like lesion in the mouth. This can occur on lips, under the tongue, or less commonly on the roof of the mouth. It is a common and harmless phenomenon, although it can be annoying for the patient.
Mucocele is probably caused by minor injury to the little tube, called a duct, that carries saliva from the salivary gland onto the surface of the mouth. The injury can be caused due to inadvertent trauma such as biting. When the injury occurs, the thick, mucus-type saliva produced by the damaged gland is released into the surrounding tissues instead of going into the mouth with the rest of the saliva. This often creates a clear or bluish bubble or blister. If the blister is poked at or further injured, bleeding can occur within the entrapped pool of saliva that would make it look red or purple.

A history of enlargement, breaking, and shrinkage is fairly common, and these lesions can be remarkably persistent. If untreated, these will often swell, break (like a water balloon), and heal over, only to swell again and repeat the cycle. This condition rarely goes away on its own. An oral surgeon usually has to remove the spilled saliva and affected gland in order to completely stop the process, but this is a rather minor procedure. The excised tissue should then be examined under the microscope to exclude the very small chance of some form of growth or tumor.