Xiao Fei is 8 years old, in the third grade, her face has been getting worse and whiter since the last year, in the words of her grandmother is not as rosy as before. “Other people’s children’s faces are like red apples, and when you look at my granddaughter, it’s like she’s been powdered white.”
This performance of Xiao Fei we call pale face, many people told her grandmother, like Xiao Fei’s case is likely due to anemia, even the local physician also recommended to let Xiao Fei eat some blood medicine. Xiao Fei is a left-behind child, her parents work abroad all the time, the family’s conditions are limited, so her grandmother also thinks that it may be Xiao Fei malnutrition caused by anemia, so she bought her ferrous gluconate oral liquid and donkey gum blood granules, eaten in accordance with the instructions for two months, the pale phenomenon not only did not improve, but also worsened.
So is this pallor really caused by anemia? If it was caused by anemia, why did the pallor not improve after two months of taking blood supplements? If Faye is still pale, why is her hematocrit in the normal range in our hospital?
In fact, anemia can indeed have the expression of pallor, but we should never think that pallor must be caused by anemia. There are many clinical causes of pallor, so we must check and identify them carefully, and not use blood supplements blindly, otherwise it will only delay the condition.
The main causes of pallor are the following.
1.Anemia
Pallor is the main manifestation of skin and mucous membrane when anemia is present. The main reason is that when anemia occurs, the body redistributes the effective blood volume through neurohumoral regulation, and the blood supply to relatively minor organs such as skin and mucous membranes will be relatively reduced, so the pallor will appear.
2.Lead poisoning
Lead poisoning, or when lead exceeds the standard more seriously, will lead to neurological damage, which causes subcutaneous vasospasm, resulting in skin vasoconstriction leading to insufficient blood supply, so patients with lead poisoning will have the main clinical manifestation of pallor, which we call “lead tolerance” in medicine.
3.Low thyroid
Thyroid hormone is important to maintain the excitability of human nervous system, and it can act directly on the heart muscle to increase the contraction of the heart muscle and speed up the heart rate, which is helpful to maintain the blood supply of all systems in human body. Patients with low thyroid hormone secretion will experience bradycardia, reduced cardiac output and even low blood pressure, resulting in pale skin and mucous membranes due to insufficient blood supply.
4. Chronic nephritis
In children with chronic nephritis, damage to the glomerular capillaries and glomerular filtration membrane and damage to the filtration barrier and charge barrier lead to the presence of long-term hematuria symptoms, and over time, the patient’s pallor will be caused by the continuous loss of a large number of blood cells.
5.Low blood sugar
Whether congenital or secondary hypoglycemia, it will stimulate enhanced sympathetic nerve activity and increased release of adrenaline, which will lead to pallor and other adrenergic symptoms in patients, which is also an early symptom of hypoglycemia.
6.Low body temperature
Once the body temperature falls below 35℃, then our superficial skin blood vessels will continue to contract in order to maintain the temperature of vital organs, and at this time, there will be sluggish reactions and pale face and other performances. The occurrence of hypothermia is mainly related to exposure to extreme cold or insufficient insulation, and can also be related to hypothermia caused by heavy sweating as a result of taking medication.
7.Other
Such as dehydration, sepsis, intestinal parasitosis, acidosis, ischemic-hypoxic encephalopathy, etc., the clinical manifestation of pale face can also occur.
In short, because the face is the exposed part of the body, its color is more affected by external factors, such as tension, cold due to vasoconstriction, can also appear pale. People who like to stay indoors and do not go out for exercise may also have a pale face because their facial skin is not exposed to sunlight for a long time, etc. These should not be confused with anemia.