The stress headache
The migraine
Treatments
Types of headaches

You may get it on one side, on both sides, in the centre or all over your head. It could be throbbing, pulsating, generalised, moderate, severe, or dull. You could get it after eating fish, working extra hard for exams, spending a little too much time with your plants or simply because you had a massive fight with your husband. Headaches have troubled us all for various reasons and with different intensities. Today, the headache is known as one of mankind's most common ailments.

What makes it a truly formidable foe is the fact that most of us tend to neglect it and use easily available painkillers to help it subside as soon as possible. Headaches, in most cases, are the first symptoms of stress that your eyes, mind or body is being put through. And if they are occurring with some regularity, we should try and identify the type of headache and, consequently, the right treatment.


For instance, over-usage of pain medication is one of the main causes of tension-type headache that account for 90% of all recurrent headaches. It starts with mild to moderate pain, often on both sides of the head. It is like a band being tightened around the head. There is the tightening of muscles of the forehead, face, scalp or back of the neck. It is also triggered by depression, anxiety or stress.

Although a wide variety of painkillers like aspirin and ibuprofen are available which promise instant relief, stressful situations are better managed by psychotherapy. Even relaxation techniques like music, exercises, aerobics, yoga and others have been found to help some people.

Other types of recurrent headaches, which are caused by congestion of blood vessels around the brain, are not so common and should not be dismissed casually.

More well-known among these is the migraine-type headache. This headache could take minutes or days to peak and then last from a few hours to several days. Striking each individual differently, migraine may occur once in your lifetime or once every week. People from as diverse lifestyles as students to housewives have complained of this headache, which starts with an aura of flashing or zigzag lights in 20 per cent of people.

More baffling is the fact that this excruciating pain can be triggered off even by your craving for food. Other factors that could start migraine include irritability, mood-changes, and regular consumption of birth control pills or constipation. In some people, chills may indicate the coming of migraine. It is also triggered by physiological changes like hormonal changes during menstruation, pregnancy and menopause. Other common precipitating factors are alcohol, red wine, perfumes, chocolates, dairy products, bananas, citrus fruits and aged cheese. Food additives such as nitrites in smoked or cured meat have also triggered an attack in some cases. Factors beyond your control like weather-changes also seem to play an important role.

Once it strikes, it causes a throbbing pain, moderate to severe, usually on one side of the forehead (temple area). When the pain becomes too severe, other symptoms like nausea, vomiting, dizziness and intolerance to light and sound also start appearing .

One obvious treatment is to avoid triggers specific to your headache. More generally, you could quit smoking and regularize sleeping and eating habits. Although no medication can claim 100% relief in this case, combined medicines consisting of caffeine and ergot are quite effective for immediate relief. Others like beta-blocker and calcium-channel blockers have also been tried with mixed success. Sumatriptan is the latest addition to a string of medicines claiming to manage migraine.

If, however, your headache lasts from a few minutes to a few hours, it could be what is called cluster-type headache. This type of headache usually strikes several times in a day giving it its name, "cluster". It starts with severe pain only on one side of the head especially the eye-socket area. You normally feel as if you have been stabbed in the eye with a poker. This is accompanied by reddening or tearing in the eye and sometimes a drooping eyelid.

Some good news for the fairer sex is that this type of headache mostly occurs in men 20-40 years of age. The attack is usually triggered by alcohol drinking, heavy smoking, consumption of certain kinds of foods like hotdogs and smoked meat.

For immediate relief you could ask your chemist to give you prescription drugs containing ergotamine. Recently, pure oxygen inhalation has been found to be of some use. Although oxygen therapy is not yet proven, it has promised sufferers some relief, for as a last resort doctors have to use codeine and steroids, which have serious side effects.


Apart from the above categorization, headaches can be of various types with their unique symptoms as shown in the following table.

IMPORTANT:

If, however, your headache is:
Unbearable
Not helped by home medicines
Associated with fever or a stiff neck
Occurs after a seemingly minor head injury
Gives you severe shooting pain
The first episode of severe headache after age 50

Then RUSH to your doctor.