Just What Is A Cluster Headache And How Can You Deal With It?

In spite of the fact that they are pretty unusual cluster headaches are regarded as being as one of the most painful things which you can experience. Luckily they are reasonably rare and, whilst other often painful headaches like migraines attack roughly 10 percent of the population, under one third of one percent suffer from cluster headaches. Many people describe cluster headaches as being much worse than migraines and some women say that they are more painful than child birth.

Cluster headaches, which generally present as a sharp stabbing pain behind one eye or near the area of the temple, are distinguished by the fact that they frequently attack at regular times. This means that they have a tendency to strike at a specific time of day, last for an about an hour or less, and then return at the same time the next day with this pattern repeating for several weeks or months. In addition, cluster headaches tend to strike without any warning and are unlike migraines which are frequently preceded by familiar symptoms like flashing lights.

Just why we suffer from cluster headaches remains a mystery although some researchers think that they arise out of an abnormality of the hypothalamus, which is the gland which regulates the body clock and is influenced by alterations to the length of the day amongst a number of other things.

Yet another notable difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. With migraine headaches roughly three quarters of the nearly 28 million sufferers in the US alone are women while only one quarter are men. In the case of cluster headaches by contrast approximately 8 out of 10 sufferers are men.

Traditional treatments for normal or migraine headaches are generally ineffective for cluster headaches and once miracle drugs such as ibuprofen and aspirin have virtually no impact.

One treatment that has been demonstrated to be quite effective is inhaling pure oxygen. Of course this treatment cannot be given until after the onset of the headache but the inhalation of pure oxygen for a few minutes will often relief the pain of the headache greatly.

Yet another relatively effective treatment is the use of a class of drugs called triptans which are regularly used in treating migraines. In this case however the drug must be administered in the form of a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove difficult because cluster headaches can sometimes produce swelling within the nasal passages. If this is the case then the drug can also be effective if it is given in the form of an injection. Once more this is a form of treatment that has to be used once the headache has appeared.

Since cluster headaches strike with such regularity it would be particularly useful to have some form of preventative medication which could be taken regularly just before a headache appears. Unfortunately however as the condition is so unusual and is not well understood we do not have much information about which drugs may or may not be effective as preventative treatment.

In extreme cases of cluster headaches surgery to block nerves and other neurological procedures can be carried out but this is very much a last resort and is not always wholly effective.

Article Source: http://www.orbitaloc.com/

TheMigraineHeadacheCenter.com provides a wealth of information on both migraine headaches and cluster headaches

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