Hi

General General TN & GPN (Old Site)
1

hi i was wondering if he endoscopic surgery is any better then the mvd, or is it almost the same? thanks michelle

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Michelle,

This question comes up from time to time. You'll find about four pages of postings on the subject if you run "endoscopic" in our search window at top right. Here is one of the answers I offered to a posting last November:

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I don't have any personal contacts at the Skull Base Institute. I can only tell you that they appear to have an excellent reputation. In the past there were doctors affiliated with them who had been nominated for "America's Best 100 Doctors" by their peers.

I'm not familiar with any physicians in New Jersey who do this procedure, but I know that it's done at other institutions besides the Skull Base Institute.

Concerning the "keyhole" procedure for MVD there are a few resources below that may give you a beginning. The first link will take you to a first-person article on the TN Association website by a lady who has had MVD surgery with both a microscope and endoscope. The endoscopic procedure is what you are thinking about when you speak of a "keyhole" procedure.

http://www.fpa-support.org/2011/01/joan-foster-patient-and-central-texas-tna-support-group-leader-her-personal-story-with-microscopic-vs-endoscopic-mvd/

The second link is to a long article on endoscopic vascular decompression, from the Skull base institute itself. It is also extensively referenced and a lot of the abstracts of the references are available through the Pub Med database at NIH:

http://www.skullbaseinstitute.com/papers/endoscopic-vascular-decompression.htm

Today there were 21 articles referenced on Pub Med for "Endoscopic Vascular Decompression" for the trigeminal nerve, among them, these:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21863517

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18698270

Feel free to come back to me with further questions after you've done some further reading.

Regards and best,

Red

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Personally, I find the endoscopic option very attractive because it creates a much smaller incision in the blood/brain barrier, which is safer regarding infections, and that part (the incision wound) would heal more quickly. I'd think this would make the recovery a bit easier, but that's just a guess.