How does cervical stenosis affect the legs?

With cervical spinal stenosis, it's common to feel numbness or tingling on one side of your body in your hand, arm, or leg. If left untreated, the tingling can turn into weakness in the arm or leg, and make it hard for you to balance.

How does cervical stenosis cause leg weakness?

Spinal stenosis that presses on the root of your spinal nerves can cause numbness, tingling, or weakness in your arms and legs. Myelopathy. When spinal stenosis squeezes your spinal cord, you may feel numbness, tingling, or weakness in your arms and legs.

Can cervical problems affect your legs?

Cervical myelopathy can affect both the arms and the legs.

Can cervical stenosis affect your legs and feet?

Cervical stenosis affects the part of the spine in your neck. Symptoms include: Neck pain. Numbness, tingling or weakness in your hand, arm, leg or foot.

Can cervical stenosis cause difficulty walking?

Cervical spinal stenosis (in the neck) with spinal cord compression may cause difficulty in maintaining balance while walking, especially in the dark. However, cervical spine stenosis with a pinched nerve does not cause gait imbalance.

Symptoms of Cervical Spinal Stenosis

Can cervical stenosis cause leg pain?

Cervical spinal stenosis occurs when the soft tissues and bones in the spine harden or become overgrown, putting pressure on the spinal cord and spinal nerve roots and causing pain, numbness or weakness in the legs.

Is walking good for cervical stenosis?

Walking is a suitable exercise for you if you have spinal stenosis. It is low-impact, and you can easily vary the pace as needed.

Can C5 C6 cause leg weakness?

An injury to the spinal cord at the C5-C6 level may cause pain, weakness, or paralysis in the arms and/or legs. There may be loss of bowel and bladder control or breathing problems in some cases.

What activities should be avoided with cervical stenosis?

How does spinal stenosis affect walking?

If you have lumbar spinal stenosis, you may have trouble walking distances or find that you need to lean forward to relieve pressure on your lower back. You may also have pain or numbness in your legs. In more severe cases, you may have difficulty controlling your bowel and bladder.

Can cervical spondylosis affect your legs?

Sometimes, cervical spondylosis results in a narrowing of the space needed by the spinal cord and the nerve roots that pass through the spine to the rest of your body. If the spinal cord or nerve roots become pinched, you might experience: Tingling, numbness and weakness in your arms, hands, legs or feet.

What is stenosis in the legs?

Atherosclerosis can cause narrowing of any of the arteries throughout the body. This narrowing or occlusion is called stenosis, and can occur in the arteries in the (the legs), or more infrequently in the arms. When it occurs in the legs and feet, it causes a disease known as lower extremity arterial occlusive disease.

Why does cervical myelopathy affect the legs?

These changes include disc degeneration, bone spurs, and thickened ligaments. Cervical spondylotic myelopathy, therefore, is myelopathy (spinal cord damage) caused by spondylosis (degeneration) in the cervical spine (neck). It affects the fibers of the spinal cord that transmit impulses to the arms, hands, and legs.

What are the final stages of cervical stenosis?

As the condition progresses, weakness of the arms and hands can occur with loss of coordination. Also, in advanced stages of cervical stenosis, problems with bowel and bladder function can result, in addition to weakness and numbness in the legs and feet, which can cause difficulty walking.

What is the best treatment for cervical stenosis?

Surgical treatment

For patients with cervical stenosis with myelopathy, the only effective treatment option is surgery to decompress the spinal cord. One type of this kind of surgery is a posterior cervical laminectomy.

Will I end up in a wheelchair with spinal stenosis?

Disability: In severe cases of spinal stenosis, a patient can end up permanently disabled. This may be through paralysis, or weakness so severe that it is impossible to stand and move as normal. It is not unreasonable to expect severe stenosis to lead to a person being bound to a wheelchair.

What helps leg pain from spinal stenosis?

Initially, simple things like an anti-inflammatory medication, such as Advil or Aleve, sometimes Tylenol, minor pain medications, change in positioning will help. Usually a patient with spinal stenosis has more pain when standing upright or walking with relief when bending forward.

What happens if cervical stenosis is left untreated?

It occurs from spinal stenosis that causes pressure on the spinal cord. If untreated, this can lead to significant and permanent nerve damage including paralysis and death. Symptoms may affect your gait and balance, dexterity, grip strength and bowel or bladder function.

Does cervical stenosis get worse over time?

Cervical stenosis with myelopathy tends to get worse slowly over time, but there is some variation. Symptoms may remain stable for long periods or rapidly worsen. Most cases of myelopathy will require an operation to relieve pressure on the spinal cord.

Why am I losing strength in my legs?

A feeling of sudden leg weakness, causing your legs to give out or buckle can be alarming. Weakness in your leg(s) may occur from problems in the nerves and/or muscles in your lower body and is usually treatable. Rarely, the underlying cause may be a serious medical condition requiring immediate medical attention.

What nerves are affected by C4 C5-C6 and C7?

C5, as mentioned earlier, along with C3 and C4, contributes to the phrenic nerve that innervates the diaphragm. Roots C5, C6, and C7 produce the long thoracic nerve, responsible for controlling the serratus anterior.

What nerve runs from neck to leg?

The sciatic nerve is formed in the lower spine by the combination of motor and sensory fibers from spinal nerves L4 to S3. These spinal nerves belong to a larger group of nerves in the lower spine called the lumbosacral plexus.

How do you sleep with cervical stenosis?

Is Climbing stairs good for spinal stenosis?

In essence, walking uphill and doing stairs decreases the space in your already-narrowed spinal channels. With spinal stenosis, you may also have pain when you're walking normally—but generally, that's when you're walking a longer distance (as in longer than from your car to the house).

Is cervical stenosis serious?

Cervical stenosis is one of the most serious results of this degeneration. Also called cervical spinal stenosis, or simply spinal stenosis, the condition is most common in adults ages 30-50 and affects about twice as many men as women.