What are the symptoms?

Symptoms include:

• Numbness or tingling in your hands and feet and sometimes around the mouth and lips.
• Muscle weakness in your legs and arms and the sides of your face.
• Trouble speaking, chewing, and swallowing.
• Not being able to move your eyes.
• Back pain.

Symptoms usually start with numbness or tingling in the fingers and toes. Over several days, muscle weakness in the legs and arms develops. After about 4 weeks, most people begin to get better.

You may need to be treated in the hospital for the first few weeks. This is because the condition can be deadly if weakness spreads to muscles that control breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure.

Call your doctor or get help right away if you think you might have Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Source: http://www.webmd.com

What causes Guillain-Barré syndrome?

Experts don't know what causes it. They think that the nerves are attacked by your body's own defense system (the immune system). This is called an autoimmune disease.

In Guillain-Barré syndrome, the immune system attacks the covering (myelin sheath ) of certain nerves. This causes nerve damage.

Source: http://www.webmd.com