What causes chronic numbness in your chin?
You might encounter chin numbness at least once in your life especially after getting certain dental work done. Right?
It is a common consequence of anesthesia (a numbing agent) injected while performing various dental procedures. Likewise, the topical anesthetics applied to alleviate painful blisters inside the mouth also numb certain portions of your face including the chin.
The unfeelingness will go away once the anesthetics agents wear down. It typically lasts for a few hours. However, if you notice numbness in your cheeks frequently, it is a matter of concern. The reason is, it can be a sign of various oral complications and serious underlying issues.
Continue reading to know more about the potential causes of chin numbness.
1) Numb Chin Syndrome
Numb Chin Syndrome (NCS) is a neurological condition that causes damage to the mental nerve distribution. Mental nerves provide feeling to the skin of our skins, lower lips, and buccal mucosa. It implies that mental nerve damage would cause a loss of sensation or tingling to feel in the chins, lips, teeth, or gums.
The condition might be a sign of several cancers. Researches also show that NCS is linked to the following types of cancer:
- Lung cancer
- Breast cancer
- Kidney cancer
- Prostate cancer
- Thyroid cancer
- Head & Neck cancer
- Lymphoma cancer
If you encounter prolonged sense loss in your chin, get a dental checkup immediately. A thorough physical evaluation and imaging techniques like MRI scans, CT scans, and nuclear scans are required to ensure if the growth of cancerous cells has triggered numbness in chins.
2) Facial Trauma
In general, our faces are comprised of 12 nerves. When any of the nerve tissue is injured due to accidental trauma, sports injuries, or others, it causes swelling. Such inflammation applies extensive pressure over the facial nerves, it makes the chin attains insensibility. Depending on the nerve injured, the sufferer would encounter numbing feeling in either left or right chin.
Treating the underlying injuries is the right way to get rid of chin numbness.
3) Tooth extraction
Loss of sensation in the chin often happens after undergoing oral surgery or some minimally invasive dental procedures. It commonly occurs in people who removed their decayed or wisdom teeth surgically.
The numbness exists for days or even weeks depending on the complication of the teeth extracted.
However, it is a rare thing because it occurs when the nerves are injured during the treatment. Aside from numbness, it is associated with discomforts like tingling, burning, prickling, and others that go off on their own once the injury is healed.
4) Dental abscess
Dental abscess – The build-up of pus in the space between teeth and gums. It is a consequence of untreated infections in gums or teeth. Such overgrowth of the infection puts excess pressure on the mental nerves hence that numbness in the chin would occur.
Treatments like deep dental cleaning are mandatory to get rid of the pus in gum pockets and its side effects like a numb chin.
5) Wearing ill-fitted dental restorative appliances
Whatever the type of restorative appliances you are using, they do not fit effectively inside the mouth as they were when they become old. Such poor-fitting dental restoration devices including dental implants will apply pressure on the teeth. It is followed by disrupting the web of nerves around the jaw.
In such cases, you are more likely to develop numbness in your chin.
What are the other possible causes of numb chin?
Aside from the dental-related factors, various systemic diseases are also responsible for chronic numbness in the chin. Here are a few:
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Diabetic Neuropathy
- Lyme diseases
- Sjogren’s Syndrome
- Sickle cell anemia
Bottom Line
When a facial nerve is compressed due to injuries, oral complications of systemic diseases, the areas around the chin will become numb. If you encounter persistent numbness in lower face regions like lips, chin, and jaw, visit your dentist immediately. With your dentist’s help, you can pinpoint the root cause of this oral complication.
Treating the disease or injury that initiated the numb feeling in chin is mandatory to overcome this dental dilemma.
