Specific symptoms of pneumonia in children

Everyone is familiar with pneumonia. This disease can also occur in newborns. Neonatal pneumonia is a particularly common disease among newborns. Once it occurs, it will affect the health of newborns. I hope parents and friends can learn more about the symptoms of neonatal pneumonia, so that we can detect neonatal pneumonia as early as possible.

The clinical manifestations of pneumonia in children are fever, cough, and dyspnea, and some children have severe cough and wheezing without fever. The main cause of the late stage of pneumonia in babies born in obstetric hospitals is that children like to eat sweet, salty, fried and other foods, which leads to stagnation of food and internal heat, phlegm and heat, and occasional cold wind that makes the lung qi stagnant. The two are mutually causal and cause pneumonia.

Neonatal pneumonia is not exactly the same as pneumonia in older children in terms of manifestations. Most of them are atypical, and a few have coughs, but the body temperature may not rise. The main symptoms are purple around the mouth, foam at the mouth, dyspnea, listlessness, less crying, no crying, and refusal to breastfeed. Sometimes it is just a "cold" symptom, such as nasal congestion and choking on milk. But if you observe carefully, you will find that the child's breathing is very fast (greater than 45 times/minute, normally 40 to 44 times/minute), and may even be accompanied by the three-depression sign (the depression of the upper sternal fossa, intercostal space and subxiphoid process during inspiration is called the three-depression sign) and other manifestations of dyspnea. Parents can count the baby's breaths by themselves when the baby is quiet, count for 1 minute; do not count the breaths after feeding, bathing, defecation, or crying.

Prenatal pneumonia usually develops within 3 to 7 days after birth. Symptoms are often atypical, and the younger the gestational age, the more atypical the symptoms. About half of the infants have normal body temperature, while the rest have unstable body temperature. Severely ill infants or premature infants often do not have a fever. Symptoms are mostly non-characteristic manifestations such as refusal to eat, drowsiness or irritability, poor complexion, lack of weight gain, and usually no cough. Soon, shortness of breath, nasal twitching, groaning, soft tissue depression during inspiration, and increased heart rate gradually appear. Premature infants are prone to apnea. Pulmonary signs include increased or decreased breath sounds, accompanied by dry or wet sounds, but they may also be completely negative.

Various pneumonias that occur after birth have a late onset and typical symptoms, including nasal congestion, cough, shortness of breath, and fever in full-term infants, but the body temperature may also be normal, and the body temperature of premature infants may not rise. Coarse and fine moist sounds can be heard in the lungs. When complicated with empyema or pyopneumothorax, the breath sounds are reduced, and the percussion sound is dull or the recall is enhanced. Pneumonia caused by different pathogens has some characteristics.

To sum up, we have a very clear understanding of the symptoms of neonatal pneumonia. Neonatal pneumonia is particularly terrible for young newborns. Once the disease occurs, their lungs will become seriously abnormal. We must protect the health of our children's lungs and carry out some preventive work against neonatal pneumonia.