Toronto neurosurgeon outlines 1,000th operation treating ‘excruciating’ facial pain syndrome

More than 3 years after Maureen Shaughnessy Kitts initial gifted debilitating pain on the right side of her face, she still finds it tough to scrupulously news a sensation.

The pain competence come on while she brushed her teeth, or sometimes, after a peaceful breeze of breeze blew on her cheek. The outcome was something like an “electric shock,” she said, with no apparent cause.

It after grown into a “constant and excruciating” sensation. When asked by doctors to rate a pain from one to 10, she pronounced it was a 13.

“I was thinking, ‘Was we devising this pain? Where did it come from? Why is it here?'” removed Shaughnessy Kitts.

But today, a weird and heated pain is merely an upsetting memory interjection to a Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Mojgan Hodaie.

“I am feeling so superb and so beholden and so grateful,” Shaughnessy Kitts told CBC Toronto.

“Through a spectacle of neurosurgery we am who we am today: totally pain free.”

Trigeminal neuralgia

Shaugnessy Kitts was diagnosed in late 2016 with a singular and serious pain condition trigeminal neuralgia (TN), that is infrequently famous as “the self-murder disease.”

It is brought on when a brain’s trigeminal nerve, that carries prodigy from a mind to a face, is disrupted, promulgation ungrounded yet really absolute pain signals to a brain.

Researchers guess that around 5 in 100,000 people might have a condition, yet it is notoriously formidable to diagnose given a symptoms can overlie with other conditions and accurately describing a pain can be serious for patients.

The issue, however, can be resolved by surgery, yet usually a handful of Canadian doctors have a imagination to perform a operation.

Dr. Hodaie, who works during a Krembil Brain Institute during Toronto Western Hospital, is a personality among them. She descibes TN as “a thunderbolt of intensely serious electrical pain.”

She operated on Shaughnessy Kitts in Apr 2017 and noted her 1,000th medicine associated to TN in early December.

“There’s no doubt it’s intensely rewarding for us to know that we’re means to work on patients and they are pain free,” she pronounced in her office. 

“It’s one of a really few pain syndromes that we’re indeed means to grasp pain freedom.”

‘Oh my God, she’s finished this’

During a standard TN surgery, Dr. Hodaie starts by creation an rent in a skull and probing to a site of a trigeminal nerve, that is around 9 centimetres into a brain.

In some cases, a haughtiness is pinned by an erring blood vessel, that Dr. Hodaie repositions before fixation a miniscule Teflon separator to forestall hit from reoccurring.

The procession takes around 90 mins and Dr. Hodaie customarily performs several such operations in a singular day. The surgery took about 6 hours when it was initial grown around 40 years ago, she explained.

About 90 per cent of patients news a detriment of pain immediately after a surgery, while around 75 per cent sojourn pain-free 5 years after a operation.

Shaughnessy Kitts removed waking adult after her procedure stunned that her pain had disappeared.

“I only felt, ‘Oh, my God, she’s finished this.’ And we don’t wish to knowledge it again,” she said.

Doctors seeking larger bargain of pain

In further to her bustling medicine schedule, Dr. Hodaie also researches TN and trains a tiny group of fellows study pain syndromes.

Her goal, she said, is to allege a medical bargain of pain and deliver new objectivity to a diagnosis and treatment.

“We are operative really strongly to figure out because does this pain occur in a initial place, and because is it that a mind is means to understand pain that is so strong,” Dr. Hodaie told CBC Toronto.

A some-more consummate bargain of TN could safeguard that some-more patients are scrupulously diagnosed and means to accept diagnosis to solve a pain, that can also embody medication, injections and radiation.

Dr. Hodaie and her group are also building new mind imaging techniques that might assistance medical professionals to accurately brand opposite forms of pain and their ensuing effects on a brain.

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/trigeminal-neuralgia-surgery-1.5426944?cmp=rss