Complex Regional Pain Syndromes ( Rsd)

Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is a chronic progressive disease characterized by severe pain, swelling and changes in the skin. Though treatment is often unsatisfactory, early multimodal therapy can cause dramatic improvement or remission of the syndrome in some patients.[1] The International Association for the Study of Pain has proposed dividing CRPS into two types based on the presence of nerve lesion following the injury.

Type I, formerly known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), Sudeck's atrophy, reflex neurovascular dystrophy (RND) or algoneurodystrophy, does not have demonstrable nerve lesions.

Type II, formerly known as causalgia, has evidence of obvious nerve damage.

Symptoms

The symptoms of CRPS usually manifest near the site of an injury, which is usually minor. The most common symptoms overall are burning and electrical sensations, described to be like "shooting pain." The patient may also experience muscle spasms, local swelling, abnormally increased sweating, changes in skin temperature (usually hot but sometimes cold) and color (bright red or a reddish violet), softening and thinning of bones, joint tenderness or stiffness, and/or restricted or painful movement.

The pain of CRPS is continuous and may be heightened by emotional or physical stress. Moving or touching the limb is often intolerable. The symptoms of CRPS vary in severity and duration. There are three variants of CRPS, previously thought of as stages. It is now believed that patients with CRPS do not progress through these stages sequentially. These stages may not be time-constrained, and could possibly event-related, such as ground-level falls or re-injuries in previous areas. It is important to remember that often the parasympathetic nervous system is involved with CRPS, and a part (subset) of the parasympathetic system is the autonomic (think automatic, like blood pressure regulation or breathing or sweating) nervous system can go haywire and cause a wide variety of odd complaints that are not mental in origin. Be sure and investigate autonomic dysfunction or disorder if you think you may have one of the often distinct varieties of CRPS. Rather than a progression of CRPS from bad to worse, it is now thought, instead, patients are likely to have one of the three following types of disease progression: