While “mouth ulcers” seems to be a very specific type of sore, it is really just a blanket term describing any number of mouth sores, such as cankers and cold sores. Virtually any abrasion inside of the mouth that breaks the mucous membrane can be a mouth ulcer, and for this reason it is easy to see that the cause of mouth ulcers is not always easy to pin down. While it is common knowledge that cold sores are the result of a virus, it is not always understood what actually triggers an outbreak. And while some canker sores can be attributed to physical injury, on many occasions, they seem to appear out of nowhere.

If you are a sufferer of chronic mouth ulcers, determining the cause of the ulcers can save you countless hours of pain and irritation. Unfortunately, it can be next to impossible to pin down your personal mouth ulcer trigger, especially considering that there are so many known potential causes of mouth ulcers, and many of them seem completely innocuous unless you know what you are looking for. For example, many people don’t realize that their toothpaste could be contributing to their mouth ulcers, or that deficiencies in certain vitamins can cause mouth ulcers to appear. This is precisely why mouth ulcers are so hard to treat, because they are often just a symptom of something else. Treating mouth sores without understanding their underlying cause is an open invitation for them to return, often over and over.

The first step to determining the cause of mouth ulcers in your particular case is by examining a list of the most common causes: herpes, smoking tobacco and alcohol consumption, spicy food, consuming hot (temperature) foods or beverages, or a mouth trauma. In most cases, a large portion of the list can be eliminated immediately, as they are not applicable to your situation or your lifestyle. Then it simply becomes a matter of which potential triggers seem to coincide with your outbreaks. Often, you will simply have an ‘ah ha’ moment in which you realize that your symptoms can generally be traced back to exposure to a certain food or product.

In more challenging cases, it may be a little bit more difficult to determine the underlying cause of ulcers. In these instances, you may have to take a trial and error approach to the matter, eliminating certain things from your lifestyle to see if doing so reduces the severity or instance of mouth ulcer outbreaks. More often than not, a little bit of concerted detective work on your part will often lead you to the answer you desire.

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