Exactly What Are Cluster Headaches And How Do You Go About Treating Them?

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
Comment this article

Although they are relatively rare cluster headaches are considered to be one of the most painful things that you can experience. Luckily they are reasonably uncommon and, while other often painful headaches like migraines attack approximately ten percent of the population, less than one third of one percent suffer from cluster headaches. Many people describe cluster headaches as being much worse than a migraine and many women describe them as also being more painful than child birth.

Cluster headaches, which normally appear as a sharp stabbing pain behind one eye or close to the area of the temple, are characterized by the fact that they normally occur at regular times. This means that they have a tendency to attack at a specific time of the day, last for an hour or less, and then strike again at the same time the following day with this pattern repeating itself for a number of weeks or months. Also, cluster headaches tend to strike without warning and differ from migraines which are sometimes preceded by symptoms like flashing lights.

Just why we get cluster headaches is something of a mystery though some scientists ...
... believe that they result from an abnormality of the hypothalamus, which is a small gland that controls the body clock and is affected by alterations to the length of the day amongst other things.

Another important difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. In the case of migraine headaches approximately three quarters of the some twenty-eight million sufferers in the US alone are women and just one quarter are men. In the case of cluster headaches by contrast approximately 8 out of 10 sufferers are men.

Standard treatments for ordinary or migraine headaches are normally ineffective for cluster headaches and such once miracle drugs as aspirin and ibuprofen have little if any effect.

One treatment which has been demonstrated to be quite effective is the inhalation of pure oxygen. This form of treatment cannot of course be delivered until after the headache has arrived but the inhalation of pure oxygen for a few minutes will often relief the pain of the headache greatly.

Another reasonably effective treatment is the use of a class of drugs known as triptans that are regularly used for the treatment of migraines. Here however the drug had to be given as a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove far from easy as cluster headaches can sometimes produce swelling within the nasal passages. When this happens then the drug may also be effective if given in the form of an injection. Once more this is a form of treatment which needs to be used after the headache has appeared.

Because cluster headaches appear with a pattern it would be especially useful to have some form of preventative medication that could be used regularly shortly before a headache hits. Unfortunately however because the condition is so unusual and is not at all well understood we do not have a lot of data about which drugs may or may not be an effective form of preventative treatment.

In severe cases of cluster headaches surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures may be carried out althoughthis should be seen as very much a last resort and it is not always wholly effective.