
Not all tingling indicates a serious health problem. This is especially true if you have chronic pain because tingling is a symptom for many chronic conditions. There are many reasons why you could be having these sensations, so it’s extremely important to identify the potential causes.

If you’ve ever experienced tingling and numbness in your hands and feet (or wrists and elbows), you know it feels a lot worse than it sounds. The loss of sensation quickly leads to wounds that become infected and foot ulcers that are notoriously hard to heal.Īt the first sign of tingling, pain, or numbness, call Florida Pain Medicine so we can start early treatment that relieves your symptoms and helps prevent complications.Tingling and Numbness in Your Hands and Feet Overview When you develop numbness, you’re at risk of complications because you can’t feel things like a change in temperature or pain from a cut on your foot. Tingling and pain can be extremely uncomfortable, but there’s another symptom caused by neuropathy that’s dangerous: numbness. In this case, the tingling or prickling feeling that begins in your feet may spread up into your legs. When blood sugar levels are too high, the excess sugar damages tiny, peripheral nerves, most often in your feet. Sciatica begins with a pinched nerve in your lower back that causes pain and tingling that shoots down one leg. These are a few examples: Carpal tunnel syndromeĬarpal tunnel syndrome arises from a pinched nerve in your wrist and causes tingling and weakness in your hand and fingers. In some cases, neuropathy symptoms may only affect your feet, while others affect your hands.

Depending on the cause of your neuropathy, you may experience a tingling sensation that radiates down your arms and legs. Tingling, electric-shock sensations, and pain are classic signs of damaged sensory nerves, a type of neuropathy that typically affects your limbs. After your brain interprets their nerve signals, you feel the sensation, whether it’s pain, heat, cold, pressure, or another sensation. Sensory nerves carry information from your body to your brain. Though you may experience a broad range of symptoms from autonomic nerve damage, two of the most common are excessive sweating and heat intolerance. The autonomic nerves control vital body functions such as your heart rate, digestion, and breathing. As you’d expect, damaged motor nerves cause symptoms such as painful cramps and muscle weakness and wasting. Motor nerves transmit messages from the brain to your muscles, allowing you to control skeletal muscle movement. However, all the peripheral nerves belong in one of these categories: Motor nerves To make things more complex, each type of neuropathy is identified by its own unique set of symptoms. These nerves form a vast network that keeps your brain informed of everything that happens in your body and allows your brain to send instructions to every organ and tissue.Ĭonsidering the size of the peripheral nervous system, it’s no surprise that there are more than 100 types of peripheral neuropathy.

You have more than 100 billion nerve cells in your peripheral nervous system.

Diabetes is responsible for 60% of all cases of peripheral neuropathy. Of all the possible causes, however, high blood sugar because of uncontrolled diabetes is at the top of the list. You can also develop nerve damage as a result of a vitamin B12 deficiency or abusing alcohol. Medications, toxins, pinched nerves, and numerous health conditions, including blood vessel disease, hypothyroidism, kidney disease, and autoimmune diseases can cause peripheral neuropathy. Your peripheral nerves are all the nerves in your body, outside the brain and spinal column. Most of the time, people use neuropathy to mean a specific type of nerve damage called peripheral neuropathy. Neuropathy generally refers to any problem that affects your nerves. But we can diagnose the cause of your neuropathy and create a customized treatment plan that diminishes your symptoms and helps prevent your neuropathy from progressing to cause complications. Many of our patients at Florida Pain Medicine don’t come in for treatment until they start to feel the pain. One of the earliest signs is tingling in your limbs, but it isn’t long before tingling is joined by pain. Neuropathy affects an estimated 30 million Americans, which is about 9% of the population.
