Trigeminal Neuralgia: causes, diagnosis and treatment

The trigeminal nerve is a cranial nerve that contains all the sensitivity of a side of the face, ie, forehead, cheek orbits, nose, upper and lower lips and teeth of upper and lower jaw and tongue.

Trigeminal neuralgia is a severe sudden pain, stabbing or shock type. It lasts for a few seconds, but is repeated in a crisis for minutes or hours. It is distributed by one or two of the three branches has the trigeminal.

Symptom

His appearance is spontaneous or triggered to speak or eat, and the group that suffers most are women from 50 to 60 years. Usually it disappears during sleep, and it is common for patients to come to the dentist because pain can affect one tooth or other jaw. The diagnosis is made primarily by the symptoms reported by the patient. It is advisable to perform brain MRI to rule out a tumor pathology that may affect the trigeminal along its path.

Treatment of trigeminal neuralgia

With cabamazepina, which is an antiepileptic, you can easily measure your blood level and thus allows us to adjust the dose to each patient. The most common side effects are skin reactions and decrease in white blood. Excessive doses produce dizziness, instability and slowness of. Not a classic analgesic drug, but it serves to prevent pain, andininterrupidamente be taken for a while.

Surgical procedures are used in the absence of response or intolerance. The most effective is the microvascular decompression of the trigeminal root level cerebellopontine angle. This involves the practice of retromastoidea suboccipital craniectomy with dural opening and exploration of the cerebellopontine angle, separating the medial hemisphere