OUR resident specialist and NHS GP, Dr Zoe Williams, shares her expert advice.
Today, Dr Zoe helps a reader who wants to know if the pain she’s having in the front of her thighs is linked to her sciatica.
Q) I SUFFER on and off with sciatica.
For the past couple of months, when the pain in my back and buttocks subsides, it is replaced with shooting pains and pins and needles in the front of my thighs.
Are the two related?
A) Your changing symptoms can be related, but shooting pains and pins-and-needles in the front of the thigh usually indicate irritation of a different nerve (not the sciatic nerve).
Typical sciatica affects the sciatic nerve, causing pain in the lower back, radiating through the buttock, and causing pain, tingling, or numbness down the back of the thigh, calf, or foot. So your earlier symptoms fit this pattern.
But symptoms in the front of the thigh are different and are typically linked to irritation of the femoral nerve, or the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve (a condition known as meralgia paraesthetica).
The femoral nerve comes from compression higher up in the lumbar spine (usually L2–L4 nerve roots), not the sciatic nerve.
The reason you might be experiencing these two different patterns consecutively is that the same underlying spinal issue – like a bulging disc or spinal stenosis – may be shifting and affecting adjacent nerve roots at different times.
This progression is common as inflammation waxes and wanes or as your body position changes.
Get this new pattern of pain assessed by visiting your GP.
TIP: It’s typical for joint aches and pains to flare up when the weather is cold.
A drug-free supplement that might help is curcumin, which has the most research behind it.
Not everyone should take it, such as those on blood thinners, so please check.
