Increased ESR in a child

The sedimentation rate of blood cells is erythrocytes, measured in millimeters per hour. This indicator is important for assessing the general state of the child's body, but can not be the only one for diagnosing an infectious process. Doctors, very often seeing increased ESR in a child, rush to prescribe antibacterial treatment, without really understanding the causes of this change in the blood picture.

Why is increased ESR in the blood of a child?

As with any parameters of the blood picture, the child's increased ESR is affected by multiple factors from the most innocent and minor, to serious enough, requiring treatment. Consider the so-called false-positive reasons in order:

1. Parents need to know when the ESR in the child's blood is increased, which is always higher for girls than for boys.
2. The moment of teething in children imposes an imprint on the blood parameters.
3. Anemia, that is, a deficiency of hemoglobin in the blood, is almost always in parallel with an increase in ESR.
4. The lack or excess of vitamins in the body is also a predisposing factor.
5. Disease banal ORZ increases ESR for at least one and a half months, so after the illness it should be taken into account.
6. The use of Paracetamol and Ibuprofen to lower the temperature or remove the pain syndrome increases the ESR for a while.
7. Post-vaccination period after the introduction of the vaccine against hepatitis.
8. Allergy and addiction to it.
9. Overweight child.

In addition to such not too serious causes of increased ESR in the blood in a child, there are also more serious ones that require a thorough and comprehensive examination. Although the very fact of an increase in this indicator above the permissible limits can not yet indicate any disease, but there are a number of diseases or conditions that last a long time in a latent form, and the high content of ESR in the blood in the child will help them to reveal:

• Thyroid gland diseases;
• oncology;
• metabolic disease;
• inflammation of organs and adjacent tissues;
• tuberculosis.

If the child is elevated with ESR, then what this means, the district pediatrician should tell you so that parents do not guess at the coffee grounds. It should be noted that this happens when the body is undergoing an inflammatory process, as a result of a common cold, flu or bronchitis, but all the same parents must be responsible and timely to give blood for analysis for early detection of diseases in the baby.