It’s estimated that more than 20 million Americans suffer from nerve injuries.
A large percentage of the time, it’s not hard to find the reason why you’re having problems with your nerves. Sometimes, though, the reasons can be elusive. Are you looking for reasons why you could have a number of symptoms of nerve damage or injury?
Keep reading for five reasons you could be suffering from nerve injury to the hand.
1. Traumatic Physical Nerve Injuries
Signs and symptoms of severe nerve injury can affect your range of motion and cause sensitivity to touch, tingling, or stabbing pain. Weakness and numbness also often accompany injuries involving a compressed nerve, even if it’s a hand injury due to repetitive use like carpal tunnel syndrome.
If you’ve had nerve injury from physical trauma, there are many kinds of hand therapy that can alleviate some of the pain, discomfort, and weakness. Keep in mind, it may never recover to 100% of its previous level of use depending on the severity of the injury.
2. Nerve Injury by Infection
Infections can cause nerve injury if they get deep enough to damage the myelin sheath on nerves, or damage them directly through necrosis.
The human hand is very complex though, with more than two dozen bones and joints, 34 muscles, three main nerves, and more than 100 tendons and ligaments in tight quarters.
Temporary nerve issues caused by inflamed tissue can also cause compression and pain, numbness, lack of blood flow, and a host of other problems. Often, if it’s nerve injury caused by peripheral infection, these symptoms are temporary.
From time to time, though, permanent damage does occur due to infections.
3. Toxic Exposure to Materials
Heavy metals and toxic chemicals can cause a variety of systemic issues, one of which can be nerve injury in peripheral nerves and limbs. This includes hands and feet.
Medications, industrial chemicals, and heavy metals are very common reasons people end up with nerve injuries. The heavy metals well-known to cause nerve problems are arsenic, thallium, mercury, and lead.
Arsenic is known to imitate Gullain-Barr disease, where lead affects motor nerves more than sensory ones. Thallium works in the opposite way, causing immense sensorimotor pain.
4. Genetic Conditions
There’s a number of genetic conditions that predispose you to nerve injury or are degenerative. There’s aren’t any treatments that are standard for hereditary neuropathies, but there are many studies underway through the USA and the rest of the world.
The most common hereditary neuropathies affect motor skills and cause numbness, tingling, and pain in feet or hands. Weakness and muscle loss often accompany the progression of the condition as well.
5. Diabetes
A related cause of nerve injury and heredity is diabetes. Many people get neuropathy through diabetes because they are unable or unwilling to manage their diabetes properly.
Treatment for diabetes is often attributed to a major change in diet and physical activity. Living a healthy live with diabetes, preventing neuropathy to begin with, is the best treatment.
High blood sugar or glucose injures nerves through the whole body, but most often it affects the legs and feet the most, but can also affect other extremities such as hands.
Keep the skin of your hands clean and dry, but moisturized to prevent cracking. It’s important to carefully monitor blisters, cuts, or scrapes if you have diabetes.
Nerve Injury: No Laughing Matter
Nerve injury is a terrible and painful thing to live with, but there are treatments available for nearly any kind of neuropathy. Many of these injuries cannot be reversed, but they can be managed.
Need more health advice? Keep browsing our articles to keep up to date on the latest treatments and health trends.
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