Post Herpetic Neuralgia (PHN) and Herpes

One further note on symptoms: A small number of people with genital herpes report pain or discomfort in the general area of the healed lesions after the normal symptoms of a recurrence have ended. The term sometimes applied to this condition is post-herpetic neuralgia, meaning pain that extends along the course of one or more nerves.

Post-herpetic neuralgia is frequently experienced by people with shingles (caused by the varicella zoster herpesvirus), and has been studied best in that population. Unfortunately, however, there is very little research on HSV-related neuralgia. The frequency of this complication remains unknown, and there are no widely accepted guidelines on treatment.

Based on what’s known about shingles, people experiencing pain or discomfort following a herpes outbreak should regard HSV as being in its active phase during this time. Analgesics such as aspirin or ibuprofen are probably the simplest remedies available for the pain, but the antiviral medications discussed in Chapter 9 may also help to reduce the duration of  post-lesion pain in shingles patients by 50% or more. For people in whom post-herpetic neuralgia is linked with frequent recurrences of genital herpes, there may be value in using a daily antiviral medication to suppress the outbreaks and thereby lessen the problem of repeated irritation to the nerves.

I recently received an e-mail from somebody asking me if I knew anything about PHN (post-herpetic neuralgia) and whether or not I had it as a result of having genital herpes. This is not the first time I have been asked these questions. In the ten years that I've been attempting to help people online the subject of PHN comes up quite a bit. So I felt it was high time I borrowed an excerpt from the book Managing Herpes - How To Live And Love With A Chronic STD. If you don't already have this book then I think it's time to order it for your home library. It's packed full of information about herpes and almost everything that you could possibly think of that is associated with the herpes simplex virus.

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