Does a Cervical Pinched Nerve (Radiculopathy) Lead to Permanent Damage?

At any one point in time, cervical radiculopathy from a pinched nerve affects millions of Americans. It involves a burning, searing type of pain that goes down an invididual's arem, resulting from a "slipped" disc in the neck pushing on an a person's nerve root in the cervical spine. Can it cause permanent nerve damage?

The answer is yes. If you take your finger and push on a nerve root of the neck while a person is awake, it will not hurt. That would be an impossible experiment to perform, but the point is that neck radiculopathy does not come from nerve roots being compressed. It comes from the inflammation that is sparked up by the pinching.

The inflammation elicits pain and it often travels through the region where that nerve root has its path for supplying sensation. For various cervical nerve roots, that may be part of the forearm, or part of the hand. These regions supplied vary slightly between individuals, and not all patients are similar to a textbook drawing.

If a neck disc herniation is pinching a nerve root, eliciting inflammation, and ending up with radiculopathy pain, it may also lead to numbness or pins and needles. These symptoms are painful and annoying to patients, but do not mean surgery is required. With these issues the surgery becomes a quality of life decision.

If conservative treatments do not work, surgery has about a 95% chance of alleviating pain. Even a successful surgery may not take away the numbness. A large amount of individuals have numbness that simply will not go away, even if the surgery was technically done perfect. Most people don't care as long as there is no more pain.

This is tough to predict, and is not the surgeon's fault of the surgeon. It's the person's body's fault. If an individual develops muscle weakness from the cervical nerve root being compressed, and it does not get better over 2 months, surgery should be considered. The reason is that the longer the neck muscle weakness persists, such as a bicep weakness, the higher the chance it will not improve after an operation. Even if the operation is performed perfectly.

Epidural steroid injections into the neck may allow individuals to avoid surgery. They may allow two things by reducing the inflammation around pinched nerve roots. They may relieve pain, and maybe permit the muscle weakness to to get better.