Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffThere is no specific laboratory test to confirm a diagnosis of Bell's palsy. Your doctor may be able to make a preliminary diagnosis of Bell's palsy by looking at your face and asking you to try to move your facial muscles.
Other conditions — such as a stroke, infections and tumors — also may cause facial muscle weakness, mimicking Bell's palsy. If after a few days there's still doubt about the diagnosis, your doctor may recommend other tests:
- Electromyography (EMG). This test can confirm the presence of nerve damage and determine its severity. An EMG measures the electrical activity of a muscle in response to stimulation and the nature and speed of the conduction of electrical impulses along a nerve.
- Imaging scans. An X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computerized tomography (CT) may be needed on occasion to eliminate other possible sources of pressure on the facial nerve, such as an infection, tumor or skull fracture.
