Medical Breakthroughs: Treatment options for trigeminal neuralgia
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For years, Marilyn Gray lived with excruciating pain in her face.
The 62-year-old described the pain as a lightning bolt to both sides of her cheeks.
“It was really painful, it would send me into attacks that would last like 15 seconds,” Gray said. “I remember one summer I had rubbed the skin off my face."
Gray said brushing her teeth, eating and putting on her makeup were among the things that triggered her trigeminal neuralgia, or TN.
Nobody knows why some get it, and some don't.
“We can point to a blood vessel that's usually compressing or touching the top or side of the trigeminal nerve, but what's interesting is that almost everyone has a blood vessel touching the trigeminal nerve as it leaves the brainstem,” Dr. Jon McIver, a neurosurgeon at Mercy Medical Center, said.
McIver says there are several ways to treat it: medication, then radiation.
The effects last only 18 months. The most permanent procedure is microvascular decompression.
“A surgeon makes a window in the bone, behind the ear on the side of the pain, and then places what looks like a very small pillow between the nerve and the blood vessel that is usually coursing over the top of the nerve,” McIver said.
Radiation didn't work for Gray, so now she's planning to try this new procedure.
Trigeminal neuralgia happens more often in women than in men, and usually in people over 50. Because it happens near the jawline, it's most often misdiagnosed as pain from a bad tooth or TMJ.
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