The second question we often get is “Why does CRPS spread?”
To answer that question, you have to understand that if you have Complex Regional Pain Syndrome in your foot/ankle, knee, back, your arm, or your whole body, it is not a problem with your actual foot/ankle, knee, arm, back or the whole body. It is a problem with the central nervous system.
That doesn’t mean that you don’t have visible changes to the area, such as abnormal hair growth, skin discoloration, and localized pain. Yes, there is damage to the local tissue, but there is a much bigger, global problem, and that is the problem in the central nervous system.
We believe that in the future, a lot of research surrounding CRPS is going to move in this direction.
One thing we have found is that a majority of our patients suffer from a chronic viral and/or bacterial infection, which then affects the vagus nerve, and subsequently affects the immune and inflammation response in the body.
There is a gray world where the nervous system and the immune system overlap. In that world, you have cells called glial cells. These cells work both for the immune system and the nervous system, and they are also responsible for the release of cytokines. The cytokines can cross the blood brain barrier and affect the brain, and they can also affect the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Once that happens, it’s like a forest fire that feeds itself, and then the pain response becomes pathological.
It is our belief that this is why CRPS spreads, and this is why we target the central nervous system when treating CRPS patients.
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) is a chronic disease that often worsens over time. Alarmingly, 35 percent of sufferers eventually report symptoms throughout the body. The disease may remain localized, spread slowly over years, or progress rapidly like a wildfire out of control.
Yes. The most common example of this that we see is CRPS spreading into the GI tract.
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