Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risk factors
By Mayo Clinic staffFactors that may be associated with or that may increase the risk of geographic tongue include:
- Having relatives with geographic tongue
- Having a fissured tongue, a condition in which deep grooves form on your tongue's surface
- Psoriasis
- Excessive stress
- Hormonal changes
- Allergies
- Systemic steroid use
- Atopic dermatitis
However, research studies about the risk factors for geographic tongue have been contradictory, and the connection between geographic tongue and other conditions is uncertain.
Geographic tongue can occur at any age. Geographic tongue affects about 1 to 3 percent of people. Some evidence suggests that it's more common in women than in men.
- Shulman JD, et al. Prevalence and risk factors associated with geographic tongue among U.S. adults. Oral Diseases. 2006;12:381-386.
- Assimakopoulos D, et al. Benign migratory glossitis or geographic tongue: An enigmatic oral lesion. American Journal of Medicine. 2002;113:751-755.
- Jainkittivong A, et al. Geographic tongue: Clinical characteristics of 188 cases. The Journal of Contemporary Dental Practice. 2005;6(1):123-135.
- Gonsalves W, et al. Common oral lesions: Part I. Superficial mucosal lesions. American Family Physician. 2007;75:501-507.
