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Managing Eczema on Lips: Understanding the Causes, Treatment Options, and Prevention Tips
Lip eczema is a condition that causes your lips to become dry, inflamed, itchy, and cracked. This tends to affect every part of one's life, as it restricts your ability to move your lips, speak, eat, and more.
With many causes to point fingers at, like genetics and allergies, the treatment options are equally as varied. They range from moisturizers for dryness and corticosteroids to regulate the immune system, to phototherapeutic devices that target deeper layers of the skin.
Overall, prevention is easier than treatment. Avoiding irritants might be easier said than done, but it is necessary for avoiding lip eczema and avoiding the exacerbation of the situation.
Understanding Eczema on Lips
Eczematous Cheilitis is more commonly known as lip dermatitis or just simply lip eczema. Eczema, as a general term, refers to an inflammation that is accompanied by extreme dryness, irritation, breaking of the skin, scaling, and sometimes infections.
When this condition occurs on the lips, it is termed lip eczema, and it can be difficult to cope with for individuals struggling with it. Not only is eczema a painful and uncomfortable condition, but it also bears with it a negative psychological impact as the skin changes are often quite visible on the lips.
When left untreated, eczema on lips can often get worse and develop into blisters and more severe, more painful, and more visible infections. This is why it is vital to fully understand eczema on lips to be able to effectively tackle the causes and achieve a prompt resolution.
Causes of Eczema on Lips: Allergies, Irritants, and Dryness
Allergies are thought to play a major role in the development of eczema on lips. A malfunctioned or irregular immune response to an allergen can result in the typical symptoms that are seen in lip eczema, such as inflammation, itching, soreness, and swelling.
It is crucial for you to identify what you are allergic to so that you can avoid eczema flare-ups. A skin patch test may be helpful in this case, especially since you can develop an allergy to agents that were previously well tolerated by your body.
Similarly, irritants can also cause your body to react abnormally. This is because the irritants may cause a break in the skin's protective barrier and make it more prone to infections. Such agents may include harsh chemicals found in creams and cosmetic products.
The breakage in the skin is primarily a consequence of the fact that your skin may be in a constant state of dryness. The dryness leads to cracks, making your lips more susceptible to infections, leading to conditions like eczema. This is why one of the attempts at preventing eczema on lips comes in the form of hydrating your lips.
A note worth mentioning here is that saliva does not hydrate your lips or help with eczema. In fact, it does the complete opposite. The chemicals in your saliva can cause more dryness in your lips, and they can even introduce bacteria to cracked skin that may result in an infection.
To properly hydrate your lips and prevent lip eczema, unscented and neutral lip balms are preferred.
Symptoms of Eczema on Lips: Inflammation, Cracking, and Itching
As previously mentioned, the main symptoms of eczema are connected to the underlying causes, which differ from one person to another.
Inflammation happens to be a major symptom of eczema that brings with it a host of other symptoms, such as swelling and soreness. It may also be associated with an infection as an underlying cause.
The cracking is generally due to dryness. Thus, it can be alleviated with moisturizers.
The itching in eczema may vary in severity, depending on the stage that the condition is at. If the eczema is long-standing and severe, then the itching is expected to be just as intense.
However, note that itching your eczema will only serve to exacerbate the situation. Itching eczema on lips will cause further cracking of the skin and introduce more bacteria. Avoid itching as much as possible and aim to deal with the urges in other ways, such as by taking antihistamines.
Treatment Options for Eczema on Lips
- Corticosteroids
These medications are commonly used to help regulate the reaction of the immune system, which helps prevent allergic reactions and exacerbations of eczema.
However, corticosteroids for the treatment of lip eczema should be taken under supervision from a medical professional, since their side effects may be severe. The side effects include immune suppression and increased risk of infection.
When considering how to treat eczema on lips, it's important to consult with a healthcare provider regarding the use of corticosteroids due to their potential side effects. This is why corticosteroids are not the drugs of choice for the treatment of eczema on lips when there is a need for long-term treatment.
- Lifestyle Modifications
This includes understanding what triggers your eczema flare-ups and avoiding them. From foods to cosmetic products and certain weather conditions, it is up to you to identify what is causing your lip eczema.
Adding a moisturizing agent to your daily routine and avoiding stress will also help keep your eczema at bay.
However, it is crucial to note that these are not definite lip eczema treatment tactics, and they may fail at times and change over the years. Hence, this is not the most reliable way to go if you are hoping to totally treat your lip eczema.
- Antihistamines
These drugs tackle a symptom of lip eczema and not the condition itself. They mostly help alleviate the sensation of itching that usually accompanies eczema on lips.
- Antibiotics
These medications will only help lessen the symptoms of lip eczema if a bacterial infection has developed.
- UVTreat Phototherapy
UVTreat's innovative phototherapy-based device offers a solution to lip eczema that helps tackle the underlying causes. Additionally, this form of eczema treatment alleviates most of the symptoms without resulting in any significant side effects.
By substantially reducing the symptoms of lip eczema, the overall condition becomes more tolerable and manageable. When the bulk of the issue is addressed, the remaining management tactics for your lip eczema may only include mere lip balm use and irritant avoidance.
With UVTreat's phototherapy treatment of eczema, there is no need to meddle with medications.
This form of eczema treatment is also totally pain-free, safe, and FDA-approved. The way it works is that it exposes the eczema-riddled skin to Ultraviolet B light, which reduces inflammation, prevents the malfunctioning of the immune system, alleviates the sensation of itching, and creates an environment that is unfavorable for bacteria to grow in, thereby reducing the chances of developing an infection, and helps the skin heal naturally from eczema.
The UVTreat device is also effective in delivering light therapy to specific areas of the skin, such as the lips. This increases the efficacy and accuracy of the lip eczema treatment, and it helps avoid affecting healthy tissue.
Final Words
With the causes of lip eczema clearly laid out, attempting to avoid eczema flare-ups becomes an easier task. Irritants, allergens, and dryness can be alleviated with some lifestyle modifications, like applying moisturizers and lip balm, and avoiding triggering chemicals and foods.
The conventional treatment tactics of lip eczema are, unfortunately, not ideal. But with the introduction of the UVTreat phototherapy eczema treatment, there is hope of a quick and painless targeted therapy that has minimal side effects.
With most sufferers of recurrent lip eczema reporting that they have exhausted their options, the UVTreat phototherapy brings a ray of hope!
