My diagnosis of tongue coating - by experience

[SuddenBB]

Has anyone had a swab culture of their tongue coating. I'm planning to do one soon this week.

I've kept a time line of my tongue coating. First noticed it on 16th July. My dental treatment started on the 10th of July. Never had a coating before that. Also my mouth started producing less saliva - xerostomia

The coating became intensely worse until I got myself tested for H pylori.

Once I started the triple antibiotic therapy which Amox+Clarithomycin+PPI, the tongue coating decreased and the bad breath decreased. The chlorhexedine also helped but very little. But the coating is still there but considerably less. Saliva production increased slightly.

Amox works both on gram positive and gram negative, but mostly gram positive.

Clarithomycin works on mostly gram negative i think.

I know one of these worked. By their action I'm trying to detect whether the coating is gram + or gram -ve

I'm planning to have a swab culture this week.

Has anyone had a swab culture of their tongue coating?

[FedUp]

I had one last week it came up all clear as well as blood count and blood test for any inflammation, everything all clear. scratches head.

The good doc who often posts says no-one can smell our tongue odor. For me personally I can smell my breath when it's my tongue which is gone upon scraping. In my case I'm dealing with some bad nasal odor.

[halitosisux]

The good doc who often posts says no-one can smell our tongue odor.

Are you sure he said that? I don't think that applies to every tongue odour. I remember he said that we should never go by what we can detect on the end of our finger when we rub it on the back of our tongue because the chemicals which appear there are not always the type of volatile chemicals which can lead to the breath actually stinking.

A good analogy (I think?) is a piece of cheese. If you sniff a piece of smelly cheese closeup, it stinks quite strongly - and if that same kind of smell appeared on our finger when we rubbed our tongue we'd be mortified. But yet if that same piece of cheese was sat on a table quite near you, you probably wouldn't smell a thing. But yet a tiny bit of shit sitting on a table would stink the whole room out, purely because the chemicals in the shit get carried into the air more easily than the chemicals in the cheese, even though at closeup the cheese might even smell more potent.

[SuddenBB]

For me personally I can smell my breath when it's my tongue which is gone upon scraping. In my case I'm dealing with some bad nasal odor.

If your coating is predominantly at the back and hence very close to the oropharynx, then your nasal odor will be there. My two cents.

Secondly BB involves a few more compounds exhaled compared to normal breath, hence yes Halito's analogy makes sense. I can't smell anything from scraping but I get the smell when I smoke and its always either at the end of exhalation or when the second when I'm inhaling and taking the cigg off my mouth. End of inhalation.

I had one last week it came up all clear as well as blood count and blood test for any inflammation, everything all clear. scratches head.

You mean no presence of bacteria? How can that be there are around 800 diff types of bacteria in the mouth. Strepp, staphy, Prevotella, Solo Bac etc.

[SuddenBB]

Hi forgot to mention that I got the same smell coming from my cousin's dog's breath. She's a pomeranian, about 12 yrs old, i.e. very old. Has lost some of her eyesight and isn't generally well. But it was the same smell, but her's was much stronger. But she's adorable either way. Not it but she.

[SuddenBB]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC149706/

Abstract

The primary purpose of the present study was to compare the microbial profiles of the tongue dorsa of healthy subjects and subjects with halitosis by using culture-independent molecular methods. Our overall goal was to determine the bacterial diversity on the surface of the tongue dorsum as part of our ongoing efforts to identify all cultivable and not-yet-cultivated species of the oral cavity. Tongue dorsum scrapings were analyzed from healthy subjects with no complaints of halitosis and subjects with halitosis, defined as an organoleptic score of 2 or more and volatile sulfur compound levels greater than 200 ppb. 16S rRNA genes from DNA isolated from tongue dorsum scrapings were amplified by PCR with universally conserved bacterial primers and cloned into Escherichia coli. Typically, 50 to 100 clones were analyzed from each subject. Fifty-one strains isolated from the tongue dorsa of healthy subjects were also analyzed. Partial sequences of approximately 500 bases of cloned inserts from the 16S rRNA genes of isolates were compared with sequences of known species or phylotypes to determine species identity or closest relatives. Nearly complete sequences of about 1,500 bases were obtained for potentially novel species or phylotypes. In an analysis of approximately 750 clones, 92 different bacterial species were identified. About half of the clones were identified as phylotypes, of which 29 were novel to the tongue microbiota. Fifty-one of the 92 species or phylotypes were detected in more than one subject. Those species most associated with healthy subjects were Streptococcus salivarius, Rothia mucilaginosa, and an uncharacterized species of Eubacterium (strain FTB41). Streptococcus salivarius was the predominant species in healthy subjects, as it represented 12 to 40% of the total clones analyzed from each healthy subject. Overall, the predominant microbiota on the tongue dorsa of healthy subjects was different from that on the tongue dorsa of subjects with halitosis. Those species most associated with halitosis were Atopobium parvulum, a phylotype (clone BS095) of Dialister, Eubacterium sulci, a phylotype (clone DR034) of the uncultivated phylum TM7, Solobacterium moorei, and a phylotype (clone BW009) of Streptococcus. On the basis of our ongoing efforts to obtain full 16S rRNA sequences for all cultivable and not-yet-cultivated species that colonize the oral cavity, there are now over 600 species.

Read the whole thing to know more ppl. I'll give my two cents on this too.

[nightmare]

Here's a good one?
http://aem.asm.org/content/76/9/2806.full

[david]

Yeah i had swab culture.. in the result is streptococcus a hemolytic.. i also had antibiotic therapy amoxicillin + clavulanat, but it didn't help.. and i still have bad breath... i also have tonsil stone.. T.T