Pain is a natural bodily response that occurs when your body suffers an injury. Whenever your body feels pain or senses danger, it sends signals through the nervous system. This message travels to the spinal cord and then up to the brain, where it's interpreted as pain. For instance, when you touch a hot stove, your body immediately reacts by removing your hands from it. Similarly, when you're cutting vegetables and the knife pricks through your fingers, pain is what you feel, but what makes you stop is what your message travels to the spinal cord and then up to the brain, where it's interpreted as pain. brain's doing.
However, nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, is different from the usual pain. It occurs when there's an issue in the nerves themselves, which can either lead to pain without a cause or remain asymptomatic even with an injury. Therefore, understanding nerve pain is crucial, as leaving it unchecked can lead to further complications.
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Understanding Nerve Pain
In an interaction with the OnlyMyHealth team, Dr Mukesh Kumar, Associate Director and Head (Parkinson's Disease Unit)—Neurology, Max Super Speciality Hospital, Saket, says, "Nerve pain is pain affecting the electrical transmission of any nerve, such as sensory or autonomic (sympathetic or parasympathetic) nerves. It may be localised, diffused, or even affect a particular territory."
This can often result in sensations such as burning, tingling, or sharp, stabbing pain and can significantly impact a person's quality of life.
Types Of Nerve Pain
According to Dr Kumar, there are many different types of nerve pain. The damage can either occur in one nerve, called mononeuropathy, or in two or more nerves in different areas, called multiple mononeuropathy.
However, people mostly sustain damage to many nerves, called polyneuropathy, reports Medical News Today.
Common types of nerve pain include:
Radicular pain: nerve compression due to spinal deformity and pain in one or two particular dermatomes
Funicular pain: pain due to ganglion involvement or dorsal root ganglion involvement
Neuropathic pain: pain caused by the involvement of peripheral nerves
What Causes Nerve Pain?
Dr Kumar says, “Nerve pain is usually caused by an injury or disease that affects your Central Nervous System (CNS) (brain and spinal cord) or the nerves that run to your muscles and organs.”
Common causes include:
- An injury to your brain, spine, or nerves
- Poor blood supply to your nerves
- Heavy alcohol use
- Phantom pain after an amputation
- Vitamin B12 or thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency
- Medicines: chemotherapy drugs
- Diseases that can cause nerve pain include infections such as shingles and HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, stroke, and vasculitis.
How To Diagnose Nerve Pain?
The most accurate way to diagnose neuropathic pain is by getting a proper physical examination by a doctor or undergoing necessary tests and screening.
Dr Kumar says that a doctor will review your medical history, ask about your symptoms, and examine your muscle strength, reflexes, and sensitivity to touch.
Some of the common tests that are usually recommended include:
- Blood tests to check your general health and look for underlying conditions
- Nerve conduction studies, which measure how quickly your nerves carry electrical signals
- CT or MRI of the brain and spine, or sonography to document the anatomy and integrity of the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, and muscles.
Treatment Options
Treatment of nerve pain depends on the aetiology. This means that before getting treatment, it is important to understand the underlying cause of the problem.
For instance, spinal pain may require surgery, says Dr Kumar, adding that the strategy starts with the escalation of medications, physiotherapy, then surgery or intervention in the form of botulinum toxin, alcohol ablation, or steroid injection.
It is important to understand that nerve pain is different from other types of pain. Therefore, simple Over-The-Counter (OTC) pain medicines, such as paracetamol, and medicines used for inflammatory pain, such as ibuprofen, have limited effect, according to the doctor.
There are medicines that your doctor can prescribe for nerve pain.
They include gabapentin, pregabalin, duloxetine, paroxetine, steroid, or opioids in combination or alone. However, it is best to consult a doctor before resorting to any of these medicines, as different people respond to medicine in different ways, and it may take a while for your doctor to find pain medicines that help you, notes Dr Kumar.
Remember, treatment for nerve pain is not as easy as it seems. From diagnosing the condition to determining the underlying cause to finding out which treatment option will work best, it is a long, tedious process. However, it is only with the help of a doctor that you can expect a better outcome.