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Loss of Touch and Sensation
What Are Tactile Impairments?
Impairments in the ability to touch, sense and feel can occur due to a wide variety of reasons. We manipulate and understand our world through touch. Touch conveys personal feeling towards another or it can convey danger such as heat or sharp surfaces. Touch can help you to orient your body in the environment. The inability to feel sensations on the skin will impact a wide range of experiences and some of the usual tools for maintaining safety.
Loss of the Sense of Touch
The nerve disorder, neuropathy, is caused by a deterioration of the peripheral nerves and can lead to numbness and sometimes pain and weakness in the hands, arms, feet, and legs. Neuropathy disrupts the body’s ability to communicate with its muscles, organs and tissues. It can cause unpleasant sensations including burning, tingling, itching, crawling sensation, dizziness, and clumsiness. Ignoring symptoms can lead to numbness or to intractable pain.
Many types of back injury and stroke cause neuropathy, sometimes very quickly and sometimes building over long periods of time, as well as limitation or loss of the sense of touch. Diabetic neuropathy can damage the sense of touch in limb extremities and, for some, also affect internal organs. People with limitations to sense of touch are particularly vulnerable to burns.
Some of the causes of neuropathy can be:
- Immune disorders
- Diabetes
- Tumor related
- Infectious
- Drug reaction or nutrition related
- Hereditary
- Traumatic and compressive back injuries
- Hypothyroid
Who Is Affected
Many people acquire a loss of sensation in the skin in the context of serious illness or injury. They include but are not limited to:
- People with Spinal Cord Injuries whose skin does not respond to stimili below the broken vertebrae because of nerve damage.
- Side effects of Stroke which may or may not recede with time and therapy.
- An estimated 50 percent of those with Diabetes have some form of neuropathy, but not all with neuropathy have symptoms. The highest rates of neuropathy are among people who have had the disease for at least 25 years.
- Side effects of drugs to treat HIV. Sensory peripheral neuropathy (SN) is the commonest neurological complication of HIV infection. HIV clearly plays a role in the pathogenesis of SN, with around 30% of people with AIDS developing this problem in the era before combination antiretroviral therapy.
- Some numbness and tingling of the extremities is common among people with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
Looking at the Impacts
People who have touch limitations from injury or illness may:
- Not be able to register vibration, light touch, and position sense resulting in a general sense of numbness, especially in the hands and feet.
- Feel as if they are wearing gloves and stockings even when they are not.
- Not be able to recognize by touch alone the shapes of small objects or distinguish between different shapes.
- Be unable to coordinate complex movements like walking or fastening buttons, or to maintain their balance when their eyes are shut.
- Be at risk of burns or other injuries because they do not register the sensation.
