Aggressive
Fat Loss 2.0 Program Review What could be more central to our
sense of self than our faces? So imagine what it would be like to
watch powerlessly while half your face progressively droops like
melted wax. That's what happens in Bell's palsy. Bell's palsy is a
condition causing weakness or even total paralysis of the muscles on
one side of the face, typically developing over 3-72 hours. It can
occur at any age and affects the genders about equally. People with
diabetes and depressed immune systems are at increased risk of having
this condition, as are women in the third trimester of pregnancy.
Bell's palsy affects about 11 out of 1000 people sometime during
their lives.
The
problem lies within the facial nerve, also known as the seventh
cranial nerve. The nerve is like a telephone-cable and contains
thousands of individual nerve-fibers. There are two facial nerves,
one for each side of the face, and by far the most common pattern is
that one side of the face is affected and not the other. The facial
nerve ultimately connects the brainstem (junction between the upper
brain and spinal cord located at the base of the skull) to the
muscles of the face. Along the way it travels through a narrow canal
in the skull bone. After exiting this canal near the bottom of the
ear it divides into thousands of tiny branches before reaching the
facial muscles.
In
Bell's palsy the portion of the nerve within the skull's bony canal
becomes inflamed for unclear reasons, though an infection with herpes
simplex virus (the same virus that causes cold sores) is suspected in
most cases. The condition is not contagious. Because the bony canal
is rigid and narrow, the swollen nerve-bundle has little room to
expand, and compression of the nerve-fibers can further injure them
and cause more loss of muscle function. MRI scans of the head can
detect the inflammation, but only if gadolinium is infused into a
vein prior to scanning.
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