Your Treatment Options for Trigeminal Neuralgia

When a condition is described as excruciating, finding relief is a top priority. This can certainly be true of the facial pain that comes with trigeminal neuralgia and, thankfully, there are treatment options.

Trigeminal neuralgia has been described as worse than passing a kidney stone or giving birth, which is another way of saying that it’s one of the most painful conditions known to humankind.

If you’re one of the 150,000 people who receive a trigeminal neuralgia diagnosis each year, we want you to know that there are roads to relief.

As specialists in all things nerve-related, Dr. Paul Gill and our team at Gill Neuroscience understand how painful a condition like trigeminal neuralgia can be, and we’re here to help. To that end, we want to review a few of the more effective treatments for trigeminal neuralgia.

Medications — first line of defense against trigeminal neuralgia

As with most health conditions, we often like to start out conservatively, and with trigeminal neuralgia, this means managing the pain with medications.

When you have trigeminal neuralgia, something — in 80% to 90% of cases it’s a nearby blood vessel — is irritating the largest cranial nerve in your face, which is your trigeminal nerve. As a result, you feel shock-like pain in your face that can be very intense.

To manage these painful sensations, we typically first try anti-seizure medications, such as gabapentin. We can also try painkillers, but we want to steer clear of anything that’s opioid-based.

Nerve blocks for trigeminal neuralgia

Another approach are nerve blocks that we administer with a needle. The nerve block is usually a combination of a painkiller for pain relief and a steroid to reduce inflammation around your nerve.

Rhizotomy for trigeminal neuralgia

Should conservative efforts fail to bring you relief, we can get more aggressive, and the next step might include a rhizotomy, a procedure in which we damage nerve fibers to prevent them from sending pain signals.

With trigeminal neuralgia, a rhizotomy targets the segment of your trigeminal nerve that’s responsible for the pain messaging. Using a chemical or an electrical current, we destroy the nerve.

We perform a rhizotomy on an outpatient basis, and the procedure can provide between one to three years of pain relief, depending upon how fast the nerve regrows.

Gamma knife surgery

This is a painless procedure in which we use a precise beam of radiation to destroy the nerve fiber that’s causing your pain.

Microvascular decompression (MVD) surgery

If your trigeminal neuralgia stems from nerve compression from a blood vessel, there is a surgery in which we can place a Teflon spacer between the nerve and the blood vessel to separate them.

The MVD surgery requires us to bore a hole in your head to access the juncture where the nerve and blood vessel meet, so it’s not a minor procedure. And you should count on a 4- to 6-week recovery period.

The good news is that the MVD procedure provides long-lasting relief for about 80% of patients.

As you can see, you’re not without options if you’re struggling with trigeminal neuralgia. To figure out which treatment is best for you, we invite you to call our office in Houston, Texas, at 832-912-7777, or use our online form to request an appointment.