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Sensory Disorders
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Sensory Disorders

Kinds of the sensory disorders: anesthesia (local or general loss of bodily sensation), hypesthesia (partial loss), analgesia, hyperesthesia (increased sensitivity). The corresponding terms for pain appreciation are analgesia, hypalgesia, and hyperalgesia or hyperpathia (strong, unpleasant, badly localized sensation); dysesthesia (perversion of sensation), topanesthesia (loss of localization sense), thermoanesthesia (loss of temperature sense), astereognosis (inability to recognize objects by touch), paresthesia (an abnormal or inappropriate sensation in an organ, part, or area of the skin, as of burning, prickling, tingling, etc.), causalgia (a burning sensation along the course of a peripheral nerve together with local changes in the appearance of the skin), polyesthesia (means sensation of one stimulus as several ones), alloesthesia (sensation of stimuli in the other place of body), allocheiria (sensation of stimuli in the symmetrical site of body), phantom-limb pains (pain in stump limb).

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage (International Association for the Study of Pain). Pain results from the interaction of a pain-producing stimulus with a receptor, and the following transmission and processing of pain-related signals in the peripheral or central nervous system. This process is called nociception. Pain evokes a behavioral response involving nocifensor activity as well as motor and autonomic reflexes. Nociceptive pain, the “normal” type of pain, is that which arises from actual or potential tissue damage and results from the activation of nociceptors and subsequent processing in an intact NS. Somatic pain is the variety of nociceptive pain mediated by somatosensory afferent fibers; it is usually easily localizable and of sharp, aching, or throbbing quality. Postoperative, traumatic, and local inflammatory pain are often of this variety. Visceral pain is harder to localize (e. g., headache in meningitis, biliary colic, gastritis, mesenteric infarction) and may be dull, cramplike, piercing, waning. This may explain the unpleasant and emotionally distressing nature of visceral pain. Visceral pain may be felt in its site of origin or may be referred to another site (e. g., from the diaphragm to the shoulder) or to a cutaneous zone (of Head) specific to that organ. Neuropathic pain is that which is caused by damage to nerve tissue. It is always referred to the sensory distribution of the affected neural structure: e. g., calf pain in S1 radiculopathy, frontal headache in tentorial meningioma.



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