New treatment may offer permanent relief to extreme pain from trigeminal neuralgia

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Imagine a pain in your face that is so intense you can't talk, eat or move - it's called trigeminal neuralgia, and up to 15,000 people a year are diagnosed with it.

When medications don't work, doctors are now offering a new procedure to relieve the pain.

Many say it feels like a jolt of pain that just won't quit. It's described as a sudden, stabbing pain usually on one side of your face.

For years, Marilyn Gray, a grandmother of 12, lived day and night with this excruciating agony.

"It was really painful. It would send me into attacks. They would last like 15 seconds," Gray said.

She recalls an especially intense attack.

"I remember one summer I had rubbed the skin off my face," Gray said.

Described as a lightning bolt to both sides of her cheeks, anything would trigger her trigeminal neuralgia, from brushing her teeth, to eating, even putting on her makeup.

"It starts all right here and back from my neck on up to the face," she said.

No one knows why some people get it and others don't.

"We can point to a blood vessel that's usually compressing or touching the top or side of the trigeminal nerve. But what's interesting is that almost everyone has a blood vessel touching the trigeminal nerve as it leaves the brainstem," said Dr. Jon McIver, a neurosurgeon with Mercy Medical Center.

McIver says there are several ways to treat it. First, medication, then radiation. But the effects last only 18 months. Surgery may be an option if medication doesn't manage symptoms.

The most permanent procedure is a surgery called microvascular decompression.

"Where a surgeon makes a window in the bone, behind the ear on the side of the pain, and then places what looks like a very small pillow between the nerve and the blood vessel that is usually coursing over the top of the nerve," McIver explained.

Radiation didn't work for Gray. So now, she's planning to try this new procedure and she's hoping it gives her permanent relief.

Trigeminal neuralgia happens more often in women than in men and usually in people over 50. Other risk factors associated with it are high blood pressure and smoking.

And because it happens near the jawline, it's most often misdiagnosed as pain from a bad tooth or TMJ.