What are the symptoms of mastitis?

After giving birth, the mother's breast skin is relatively delicate, and the baby's sucking often causes nipple inflammation and ulceration, which often leads to symptoms of mastitis in the mother. When mastitis occurs, it is important to pay attention to timely treatment, otherwise the mother may develop sepsis. So, what is mastitis and what are the symptoms of mastitis?

Patients with early-stage mastitis experience swollen and painful breasts, tender lumps in the affected area, redness and heat on the surface of the skin, and systemic symptoms such as fever. Severe acute mastitis can lead to large-scale necrosis of breast tissue and even sepsis. The white blood cell count is significantly increased and the nuclei are shifted to the left. The inflammatory mass often softens within a few days to form an abscess. Superficial abscesses can be felt and fluctuate, while deep abscesses require puncture to be confirmed.

If mastitis continues to develop, the above symptoms will worsen, the pain will become pulsating, and the patient may have chills, high fever, rapid pulse, etc. The axillary lymph nodes on the affected side of mastitis are often swollen and tender.

Breast abscess can be unilocular or expand to multilocular due to untimely drainage; or it can penetrate the skin from the outside, or the abscess can rupture into the milk duct and form nipple pus discharge; several lesions can also exist in the same breast at the same time and form multiple abscesses. In addition to slowly breaking outward, deep abscesses can also penetrate deep into the loose tissue between the breast and pectoral muscle, forming a retromammary abscess.

Severe mastitis is accompanied by high fever, chills, obvious breast swelling and pain, local skin redness and swelling, nodules and tenderness, and enlarged and tender lymph nodes in the affected side. The inflammation of mastitis softens within a few days, forming a breast abscess with a sense of fluctuation. The skin deep in the abscess is red and the fluctuation is not obvious.

When suffering from mastitis, you will often feel breast pain and soreness. If your baby feeds at this time, the pain will be unbearable. In severe cases, people will often have symptoms of high fever. At this time, you must not take it lightly and you should seek medical attention in time to relieve the pain of the mother. If mastitis is severe, you can temporarily stop breastfeeding your baby.