Tingles after steroid injections
Hi all
I had stereoid injections yesterday at 3.30pm. My hands were hurting last night, not as much this morning. However, I have pins and needles in both hands, particularly in my right hand. I get this anyway due to Carpal Tunnel but it's a little worse than normal at the moment. Is this right?
Thanks
Sharon
Hi Dr Bland
I am still getting quite a lot of pain and tingling. Do I just need to wait and see? Do the steroid injections sometimes take longer to kick in? Not sure what to do next. Driving seems to be a trigger for me so I am trying not to do as much but as I cover a wide area with my job it's a little bit difficult to avoid. If the steroid injections don't work the first time, do they sometimes still work the next time you have them? Is it worth carrying on with that is that I am asking really or just have the op?
Best wishes
A very good set of questions. We have seen a few people whose symptoms settle up to about 4 weeks post-injection, which is why we aim to review at 6 weeks. There are about 20% of people who seem not to respond to a first injection. Of course in that situation one tends to give up and move to surgery but we have seen a few people who wanted to give injection a second chance despite a lack of response the first time and some of them have responded to a second injection. This topic deserves looking at with a formal research study but we are concentrating on other things at present. Until we, or someone else, get around to looking at it formally we allow patients who have not responded to one injection to try one more fairly soon afterwards if they wish but the majority of people opt for surgery - at least provided that we are certain the problem is CTS. In a few patients we are not sure that CTS is the problem and we use injection as a kind of test. In that situation a failure to respond is a bit of a warning sign regarding surgery. JB
Thank you. I will see how it goes I think and a decision on the injections or the operation can be made then. Thanks for your time. I really appreciate this site. It's a brilliant idea and I am sure people feel very reassured by it.
Best wishes
You are welcome. We'll be in touch round about 6 weeks post injection if we don't hear from you anyway and we'll have a think about further courses of action then. If you can complete another severity questionnaire here on the website at about 6 weeks that's a good idea too. JB
Not exactly what you might call common but we have seen it before and it has always settled fairly quickly. The pain element usually goes with in a week and I think the longest we've seen has been about 3 weeks, at least since we started going out of our way to record these things. The tingling is harder to assess as you say because it's very much one of the symptoms of CTS anyway so if you are one of the unlucky ones who don't respond to injection it can just carry on. Keep me posted on how it evolves over the next few days please. JB