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Neuralgia Pain

Neuralgia pain is nerve pain that affects your face. Women experience facial neuralgia pain, also known as trigeminal neuralgia, more often than men, and normally after age 50. At first the attacks can consist of short bursts of pain, but the condition can progress and cause longer and more intense pain. With proper medication, neuralgia pain can be managed.

  1. Causes

    • The trigeminal nerve carries information from the face to the brain. When the nerve becomes damaged, malfunction of the nerve causes pain to occur. Aging or a disease, such as multiple sclerosis, can damage the nerve. In some cases a cause for the damage cannot be found.

    Symptoms

    • Symptoms of neuralgia pain include severe shooting pains that can feel like electric shocks, pain in one side of the face, pain that is triggered by facial movement such as chewing or speaking and attacks that sometimes last days or weeks.

    Diagnosis

    • Your physician will want to know what parts of your face are painful, what triggers the pain and how long the pain episodes last. He will conduct tests in which he touches your face to determine if the trigeminal nerve is the cause of the pain. He may also order an MRI to see if multiple sclerosis is causing the damage to the nerve.

    Treatment

    • Medication is the first line of treatment for neuralgia pain. Anticonvulsants block or lessen pain signals coming from the brain. Muscle relaxants may also be prescribed in conjunction with the anticonvulsants. Your doctor can inject alcohol into the affected parts of your face. The alcohol numbs the nerve to control the pain, but the relief is temporary, so repeated treatments might be necessary. If these treatments aren't effective, surgery is an option. But even with surgery the pain may come back years later.

    Alternative Treatments

    • There are some alternative ways to treat neuralgia pain for people who prefer not to take medication, although there is no evidence to back up the effectiveness of these methods. Treatments like acupuncture, vitamin and nutritional therapy, and electrical stimulation of the nerves can be tried to see how they might work for you.

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