Symptoms
Hi everyone I'm new to this so please bare with me!!
Just wanted a bit of feedback on any of your symptoms , I havent been offically diagnosed yet waiting for my nerve test in December.
I have a strange numb/ tingly feeling all the time in my middle finger tip & thumb side of my ring finger tip on both hands, its worse in my right hand (im right handed) & occassionally my wrist aches. I have always woken up in the night with numb hands (not every night!) but its something thats happened as long as I can remember. I have seen two doctors, the first tapped the nerve on my right wrist & it sent pins & needles up to the two numb finger tips, they both said they think its Carpal Tunnel. I also get pins & needles in my hands when I sit in certain positions or when driving, it goes when i shake or move my hands around. Does any of this sound familiar??
Thank you for your time
Dawn x
Thank you very much for the reply
The only thing is I've read people get a lot of pain with CTS, I don't have pain just this weird numb feeling in my fingertips, I noticed yestersday it was worse when I wole up, eased abit after afew hrs, shouldn't it be better when you rest?
Thanks again, Dawn x
No your story is actually more typical than the pain version. In most cases of CTS the early symptoms are tingling and numbness rather than pain, though the tingling can have a peculiarly unpleasant quality. You hear more socially from patients who experience pain because they tend to talk about it more - it's a more obtrusive symptom. Although pain is usually a marker of later, more advanced CTS in a few patients it seems to occur as an early feature, for reasons which are not at all clear, though it may be down to biochemical differences between individuals - some patients may just have more prostagladin e2 (which acts as a pain sensitiser) in their carpal tunnels perhaps. JB
Thanks for the reply again, sorry to keep asking question I'm just having abit of a tough time conviencing myself its CTS and not something more sinister!
This morning my right hand seems pretty bad, the tingly hit your funny bone feeling feels in my hand and possibly little fingers as well as the usual numb finger tips is that another sign?
Thank you, dawn x
Pretty typical. It's not supposed to affect the little finger but some patients do seem to get symptoms in the whole hand. As a further, more quantitative answer to the pain question I have just looked at the answers to one of the questions in our symptom questionnaire in a large series of patients. You will remember seeing the first pain severity question which asks 'how bad is the pain at night?' - with answers ranging from none (scored as a 1) to very severe (scored as a 5). I have therefore taken the average answer to that question for the right hand for 12257 patient visits and related those answers to the neurophysiological severity of CTS found in that right hand. The average answers are as follows
Grade 1 - the mildest CTS - 2.32
Grade 2 - 2.58
Grade 3 - 2.69
Grade 4 - 2.81
Grade 5 - 2.98
Grade 6 - 2.56 (the worst CTS)
You can see that the severity of pain reported increases steadily as the CTS becomes more severe in physiological terms up to grade 5 but then drops off sharply at grade 6 - this reflects the fact that most grade 6 patients have so much numbness they cannot feel pain any more. JB
It certainly sounds like CTS from that description and you have a very high symptom score on the questionnaire so I will be very surprised if you do not have abnormal test results in December. If you have not tried it already then it would be well worth trying to get hold of a splint to be worn at night - a very good first-aid/self-help measure for CTS, and also useful from a diagnostic point of view. Details of what to look for can be found in the treatment pages of this site. JB