Surgery for trigeminal neuralgia

  ”Trigeminal neuralgia, also known as “face pain,” is a recurrent paroxysmal pain that occurs in the face and is sudden, stopping, lightning-like, slashing, burning, stubborn and unbearable. Most trigeminal neuralgia starts at the age of 40 and occurs mostly in middle-aged and elderly people, especially in women.  The pain is mainly located in the skin of the face, the mucous membrane of the mouth, nasal cavity, paranasal sinuses, teeth and meninges, and lasts for a few seconds or minutes. Patients with trigeminal neuralgia are often afraid to wipe their faces, eat, or even swallow saliva, thus affecting their normal life and work. Therefore, this pain is called the “world’s first pain”, also known as painful twitching. Trigeminal neuralgia is often treated as toothache, and tooth extraction is performed, but the pain is not reduced.  The main treatment methods for trigeminal neuralgia are local puncture radiofrequency ablation or alcohol injection to destroy the nerve, gamma knife destruction and surgical treatment. It is generally believed that the local puncture method, because it is blindly based on experience, is prone to unpredictable risk of lethality due to vascular damage caused by the technique and patient variability. Moreover, local puncture and gamma knife are prone to excessive injury and numbness in non-painful areas because they are not treated under direct vision. In other words these methods have many factors beyond the control of the physician, and although the damage to the skin and other tissues is small, the damage to the nerves is large and the outcome of the treatment is difficult to control precisely.  They are generally suitable for patients who are old and have many underlying diseases that make it difficult to complete the surgery. Surgery, however, can make up for these shortcomings by fundamentally separating the disease-causing blood vessel from the trigeminal nerve, stopping the disturbance of the nerve by the beating of the blood vessel, and thus curing the neuralgia. This method is widely used abroad, not only for trigeminal neuralgia, but also for glossopharyngeal neuralgia, with an overall efficiency of 90%, and the surgery is precise, causing little damage to the nerve and avoiding subsequent complications.