Teething can cause many symptoms, but fever is the one we care most about. Whether teething causes a fever can have real implications for a child’s health and their healthcare. Doctors take fever in infants very seriously. If a baby has a fever and it is not clear why, we may have to test their blood or urine or maybe even put a needle in their back (otherwise known as a lumbar puncture or spinal tap) to find the source of the infection. If the fever can be chalked up to teething, then doctors might not need to be so worried about looking for other causes of the fever. In a survey of 462 parents, nurses and paediatricians, almost all of the parents surveyed reported that they thought teething caused a fever. In a similar survey of paediatricians, paediatric dentists and parents, the majority of each of these groups believed the same thing.
Because plenty of people obviously share the same concerns, we wanted to find out the truth – which we uncovered in two separate studies. The first study followed 123 teething children aged between four months and one year. In this study, parents took their child’s temperature twice a day, and recorded whether they had any of the following symptoms: increased biting, drooling, gum-rubbing, sucking, irritability, wakefulness, ear-rubbing, facial rash, decreased appetite for solid foods and mild temperature elevation. In addition, parents kept track of every tooth eruption. The parents recorded more symptoms in the four days before a tooth emerged, the day of the emergence and the three days after the tooth popped through – in total, an eight-day teething period. Despite experiencing any combination of the aforementioned symptoms, a fever above 102° Fahrenheit was not found to be commonly associated with teething.
In fact, more than 35 per cent of the teething infants had no symptoms at all – and no single child in the study experienced a fever of 104° Fahrenheit or a life-threatening illness of any kind. A second study, using similar daily temperature and symptom records, found teething was not associated with either a ‘low fever’ (a temperature below 102° but above 98°) or a ‘high fever’ (102° and over).
Although teething can certainly make a child uncomfortable and may cause some changes in a baby’s behaviour, fevers should not be explained away by teething. There is no evidence to support a clear connection between fever and teething, and parents and doctors alike should look seriously for other causes of fever in a teething baby.