A Guide to Facial Numbness and Tingling
If you are experiencing facial numbness and tingling together, you have a condition known as paresthesia. Paresthesia is not restricted to facial numbness and tingling but can refer to numbness and tingling anywhere on the human body. It can come and go or it can be a permanent condition.
Facial numbness and tingling are actually two opposing conditions which happen at the same time. Numbness means that you have lost all sensation or feeling while tingling is a strange, abnormal feeling. Paresthesia, in fact, comes from the Greek, para means abnormal and aesthesia means feeling.
Other ways of describing facial numbness and tingling include pins and needles or a prickly, crawling feeling. The face is not the only place you can experience this sensation, it can also affect other parts of the head or trunk and is particularly disconcerting when it appears on fingers and toes.
Facial numbness and tingling is often the expertise of a neurologist because the head is affected by spinal nerves, which go from the spinal cord to the brain. It is actually the fifth cranial nerve, or trigeminal nerve which affects feeling around your face. The area of skin that is affected by a spinal nerve also has a name, and is known as a dermatome. The placement of the facial numbness and tingling in traced to its specific dermatome from which the exact nerve causing the problem can be identified.
If you have facial paresthesia, it usually just appears out of nowhere. You could have other symptoms as well, such as pain, swelling, a rash, muscle weakness or cramping. When extremities are involved, people might describe the feeling as “falling asleep.” If you sit in one position for too long and your weight presses a nerve against another object, such as the ground, you often say your leg fell asleep.
Waking up your leg, can be an uncomfortable feeling as it does go through a stage of pins and needles before becoming normal again. When your leg is involved in a situation like this, the condition is caused by a lack of blood flow to the leg. There are many other causes of paresthesia which can last from only a few seconds to many minutes or a much longer period of time.
Other conditions which cause numbness and tingling include panic attacks, a lack of fluids, whiplash, a small stroke or TIA (transient ischemic attack), hyperventilation syndrome, seizures, and more. While these are temporary, permanent numbness and tingling can come from many diseases and conditions as well.
For instance, any nerve damage or trauma to the brain or spinal cord can cause facial numbness and tingling. Other instances of numbness and tingling can be caused by multiple sclerosis, meningitis, circulatory diseases, atherosclerosis, metabolic or hormone disorders, such as diabetes or menopause, infections like herpes, syphilis, or rabies, AIDS, leprosy, fibromyalgia, or bone and joint disorders, such arthritis or osteoporosis.
Other reasons for numbness and tingling include blood disorders, tumors, skin conditions such as a burn or frostbite, migraines, anxiety and other psychological conditions, chemotherapy, alcohol and drugs, hereditary diseases, poisonings, and prescription and over-the-counter medications.
If you have facial numbness and tingling that does not dissipate after a reasonable amount of time, see your doctor for diagnosis and treatment. You will have to answer questions about how the symptom came about and depending on the cause, you might have to have a test such as an MRI or CT scan. The chances are good that nothing is terribly wrong unless you have a long list of other symptoms.