Nerve Injuries: Causes, Symptoms & Compensation Options

Your nervous system is responsible for transmitting all sensory and motor signals in your body, including those that run to your involuntary systems, like digestion and circulation. When you injure these nerves, you can experience symptoms ranging from numbness to paralysis.

Nerve damage can result from many types of trauma. Car accidents, falls, and electric shocks can damage your nerves. Unfortunately, nerve damage is permanent. Although doctors may find ways to temporarily relieve your symptoms, they cannot regrow nerve tissue. As a result, any disabilities caused by nerve injuries will remain with you for the rest of your life.

What Is Nerve Damage?

Before getting into the mechanics of nerve injuries, you must understand how nerves work. Nerves are the communication lines between your brain and your body. Every muscle, organ, and nerve ending connects to your brain through nerves.

Nerve cells, also called neurons, make up every structure in the nervous system. The neurons that make up your brain and spinal cord comprise the central nervous system (CNS), while the peripheral nervous system (PNS) involves all of the nerves that connect to the CNS.

The term “nerve damage” typically refers to an injury to the PNS. When a peripheral nerve suffers damage, it cannot transmit signals. Nerve damage may cause the nerve to misfire, producing unintended signals. In a worst-case scenario, nerve damage may weaken the signal or cut it off altogether.

What Are Common Causes of Nerve Damage?

Nerves carry nerve impulses using a combination of chemical and electrical signals. Each neuron creates an electric charge by moving ions from inside the cell to its surface. By using electrical signals, impulses move at high speeds, giving you rapid reflexes.

The content of the signals is determined by the firing pattern of the neurons and the chemical neurotransmitters released by the neurons. While researchers do not know exactly how the body encodes the different signals used, they know that changing the firing pattern or the neurotransmitters produces a different signal.

Unfortunately, when nerves get damaged, it disrupts these signals. Nerve injuries typically take one of the following three forms:

Laceration

When an injury severs or tears a nerve, the nerve signal cannot jump the gap created. As a result, the nerve no longer carries sensory signals from the body to the brain or motor signals from the brain to the body.

Lacerated nerves will not regrow. Doctors can sometimes repair a nerve by grafting a donor nerve into the gap.

A laceration nerve injury often happens when a foreign object severs the nerve. For example, a tool blade could slice a nerve in a workplace accident. Lacerations can also occur when a fractured bone tears through a nerve. Thus, you might experience nerve damage symptoms in your foot after you break your leg in a pedestrian accident.

Traction

Pulling forces, also called traction, can damage a nerve by stretching it too far. It can also pull the neurons apart so they cannot communicate effectively. The signals may drop or weaken as they travel along the damaged nerve.

A traction nerve injury can happen when you hyperextend your body. An example of a traction injury occurs during labor and delivery when a doctor pulls too hard on a baby’s arm. The forces stretch the brachial plexus, a nerve bundle in the baby’s shoulder. The baby may have a weak or paralyzed arm as a result of the medical malpractice.

Compression

Compression of a nerve causes inflammation, which can cause the nerve to generate errant signals or drop signals.

Nerve compression often results from injuries like herniated discs. A disc that swells or slips out of place can compress a nerve root, causing nerve injury symptoms. Similarly, swelling from a torn muscle can cause nerve compression.

What Are the Potential Symptoms of Nerve Damage?

The PNS includes several structures that could suffer damage in a traumatic incident. 

These structures include the following:

• Cranial nerves connecting the brain to the face and sensory organs of the head
• Nerve roots branching from the spinal cord to carry nerve signals for entire body regions
• Peripheral nerves connecting nerve roots to individual muscles, organs, and nerve endings

The symptoms of nerve damage depend on which nerves were damaged. Thus, a nerve injury to a cranial nerve might cause facial paralysis or hearing loss. Similarly, nerve damage to a nerve root might cause weakness and numbness in an entire body region, such as your left leg. Peripheral nerve damage might also cause localized paralysis and loss of sensation.

Another factor in the symptoms you might experience is the type of nerve signal disrupted by the injury. Your nerves carry the following three types of signals:

Autonomic Signals

Autonomic signals control your involuntary systems without requiring any conscious thought. These systems include your circulatory and respiratory systems. 

When you damage your autonomic nerves, you may suffer from:

• High or low blood pressure
• Arrhythmia
• Uncontrolled sweating or shivering
• Constipation
• Sexual dysfunction

When you lose the autonomic signals, you might have difficulty controlling your bowel and bladder as well.

Motor Signals

Motor signals produce motion by telling your muscles when to contract and relax. 

Symptoms that result from damage to motor nerves can include the following:

• Paralysis
• Weakness
• Muscle spasms
• Loss of dexterity and fine motor control

The severity of the impairment depends on the severity of the damage. A severed nerve will produce total and permanent paralysis below the injury. A compressed nerve may only cause weakness.

Sensory Signals

Sensory signals deliver information to the brain from your sense organs. 

Symptoms that might occur after an injury that disrupts sensory nerves include the following:

• Pain, including pain that radiates into uninjured body parts
• Numbness
• Tingling
• Loss of vision, hearing, smell, or taste

When nerve damage interferes with sensory signals, you may lose sensations or have sensations that do not correspond to any physical phenomenon. For example, a nerve injury in your lower back might cause pain in your hips and legs even though you did not injure them.

How Can I Get Compensation For Nerve Damage?

You can seek compensation if someone else’s actions injure you. In most cases, you must prove that the other party acted negligently in causing your accident. Thus, you can seek compensation if another driver runs a stop sign and hits you. However, you might not have a claim if the other person was traveling at a reasonable speed but slid due to icy roads.

Nerve damage can cause permanent disabilities that interfere with your ability to work or engage in activities you enjoy. Contact Tillmann Law Personal Injury Lawyers for a free consultation to discuss your nerve injuries and the compensation you can pursue for them.