Facial Nerve Pain – Causes, Symptoms & Treatments
Do you encounter sharp, lingering pain when you touch your face? Are you struggling to brush, shave, put makeup, and even washing your face due to this aching pain in your face?
You might have a nerve disorder in your face and this condition is referred as trigeminal neuralgia. This is a progressive condition and various medications, therapies are available to alleviate this facial nerve pain.
How does this facial pain occur?
To understand why pain in the facial nerves occurs, you have to know a little about the trigeminal nerve.
In our head, a set of 12 paired nerves called cranial nerves arise directly from the brain. They are responsible for our sensory and motor skills. Trigeminal nerves are one among those 12 cranial nerves and they help in feeling sensations in our face. The trigeminal nerve runs inside our skull and divides into 3 branches controlling the sensation in various regions throughout our face. They are:
- Ophthalmic Branch – Controls our forehead, eye, and upper eyelid
- Maxillary Branch – Controls lower eyelid, upper lip, nostril, upper gums, and cheek
- Mandibular Branch – Controls jaw, lower lip, lower gums along with muscles required for chewing
When any of the three branches gets irritated or injured due to infection, accident, side effect of any ailments, trigeminal neuralgia (pain in facial nerves) occurs.
In most cases, it causes pain on one side of your face (i.e) upper or lower jaw. After that, it radiates on the other side also. Such pain in both sides of the face is termed as “Bilateral Trigeminal Neuralgia”.
What are the possible symptoms of Trigeminal Neuralgia?
The exact cause of pain in facial nerves is still unknown but doctors believe that pain, burning or shocking sensation throughout the face happen with the compression of the facial nerves.
Trigeminal neuralgia is also classified depending on the factors that exert pressure over the nerves as follows:
- Primary Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN1) – It happens with the contact between arteries or veins with the trigeminal nerve that is located at the base of the brain. This applies pressure on the nerve and induces aching pain.
- Secondary Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN2) – In type 2 TN, the pressure on the nerves happens with things like cysts, tumors, facial injury, or other medical conditions.
The type of facial nerve disorder is characterized by the degree of pain or discomfort it instigates.
- TN 1 – In Primary Trigeminal Neuralgia, the sharp, intense, shock-like pain radiates around the eyes, lips, jaw, nose, scalp, and forehead. The pain gets worsens over time.
- TN 2 – The secondary trigeminal neuralgia also provokes constant pain but it is less intense than type 1.
Remember that if you get the achiness in the face, facial twitching uncontrollably even for a light breeze, or the pain in one area radiates to a wider region, visit your dental doctor as soon as possible.
What are the treatments available for facial nerve pain?
Doctors detect whether the facial nerve is compressed or not by touching various regions of your face. Moreover, imaging systems like MRI are required to check whether the nerve disorder happens with a tumor or any infectious conditions.
If you visited your doctor for this condition, you would get medications. Right? The medicines recommended for trigeminal neuralgia will not address the problem completely but helps in alleviating the pain in facial nerves.
Here is the list of medications commonly prescribed to reduce facial nerve pain:
- Muscle relaxants
- Anticonvulsant Medications
- Botox
- Tricyclic antidepressant
Similarly, there are a few surgical procedures to treat trigeminal neuralgia. Doctors recommend surgical treatment only for patients whose bodies are healthy. The surgical procedures prescribed to treat trigeminal neuralgia include:
- Balloon Compression
- Glycerol shot
- Gamma knife radiosurgery
- Microvascular decompression
- Neurectomy
- Radiofrequency ablation
Bottom line
Many people think that facial nerve pain occurs due to dental problems because chronic trigeminal neuralgia shares the symptoms of certain dental problems like an abscessed tooth, TMJ. Rare are the cases, facial nerve pain happens with oral problems, improper dental works.
