Recovery

If you’re having surgery for Bell’s Palsy, your prognosis is already very bad. Most likely the nerve will not completely recover in those patients – that’s the likelihood of it. That does take up to a year. In general, you assume that any kind of nerve growth, minimal amounts of nerve growth takes about 3 months. Any type of longer distance nerve growth takes up to a year. Past the year, you typically don’t see much of an improvement, although you still can see improvements for up to 3 years. You can determine this or if there’s going to be any changes with electrophysiology, doing testing to look for fibrillation potentials and myogenic potentials – meaning the potentials of the nerve themselves and the muscles as they react when the nerve gives a signal. The recovery from Bell’s Palsy varies from person to person on the severity of the degradation of the nerve. Patients with very mild cases tend to resolve within the first 3 weeks. Patients with more significant or severe debilitation from it usually take 6 months to a year to resolve if they resolve.