Post Viral Neuropathy? Please help
 

I apologize if I originally posted this under the wrong section.

I'm a 26 year old male in otherwise good health. In recent months, I've been experiencing some severe neurological pain. It started in September around a week after experiencing a sinus infection/sore throat. The first noticeable signs included a stabbing type pain in my wrist and lower ankle. As it progressed, the pains appeared to affect my entire body with stabbing like pains everything. Recently, the pain is most noticeable in my fingers and toes. It feels like pinching nerves under my skin. However, I've felt the pains all over including legs, arms, face, abdomen. I've also had some muscle soreness, random muscle twitches/spasms (quite often all over including in my eyes), some burning pain under my feet, and sometimes it feels as if my limbs go to sleep too easily.

I've been to the doctor, who kind of dismissed it as stress (but that was early on, but received basic blood tests, results normal). I also received a nerve conduction study and neurological exam from a neurologist. However, the results appeared normal. I know the nerve conduction doesn't always detect small fiber nerve problems though. They wanted to do an MRI, but my medical bills are piling up and that appears to be on hold. I've also had random itching since earlier this year, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it.

As long as I can remember, I've had some pinching/burning nerve pain in my outer thighs if I stand in one place too long but it had never seemed too severe to see anyone about and I had never felt it anywhere else. Also, I've long experience burning under my feet from standing in the same spot too long as well. Not sure if what I have now spread from that?

I understand a diagnosis can't be made online but hopefully I can gather some insight so I can understand better what may be going on.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Glad you came over here--
 

--I answered you on the other forum you posted this on before I came over here this morning:

http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/thread161070.html

It is certainly possible this is a post-infectous neuropathy, a number of neuropathies, most notably Guillain-Barre and related syndromes, often have a prior history of infection by bacterium or virus before the neuropathic symptoms begin.

Thanks for your response! Just wondering, did they ever find the cause of your neuropathy symptoms? I've read in some cases that they never find a cause, thus rendering the neuropathy idiopathic.

Not specifically--
 

--as all the tests besides the skin biopsy came out negative or normal, including tests for specific anitbodies.

However, in the acute phase of my syndrome, the Cornell-Weill Center's own test for ganglioside agglutinins--a sort of gross measure of autoantibody activity to components of peripheral nerve--showed up as a slight positive. The interpretation of this is that I had some sort of antibody activity going on, but it may have been antibodies unique to me and my molecular configurations, not one to components of nerve everyone has (and that could have been identified, such as antisulfatide, anti-MAG, anti-GQB, GM, Hu, etc.)

Autoantibody activity is a fascinating topic, and everyone with a "cryptic" neuropathy should have testing done beyond the usual anti-nuclear antibody types that rheumatologists usually test. A good list is found here (and a lot of us use these spreadsheets as a guide to testing in general, as well as a way to track to test results over time):

www.lizajane.com

Thanks for the reply! I'm not sure if your link works correctly though.

You're right--
 

--I was going to fast and put ".com" instead of ".org". (Brain fart.)

www.lizajane.org will bring you to the site.