Exactly What Is A Cluster Headache And How Can We Treat It?

Despite the fact that they are rather unusual cluster headaches are regarded as being as amongst the most painful things that you can experience. Happily they are reasonably unusual and, whilst other frequently painful headaches such as migraines strike about ten percent of the population, less than one third of one percent suffer from cluster headaches. Many people describe cluster headaches as much worse than migraines and many women say that they are more painful than giving birth.

Cluster headaches, which normally appear as a stabbing pain behind one eye or close to the area of the temple, are distinguished by the fact that they frequently appear at regular times. This means that they have a tendency to attack at a particular time of day, last for an hour or less, and then attack again at the same time the next day with this pattern repeating for a number of weeks or months. Cluster headaches also have a habit of striking without any warning and differ from migraines which are often preceded by familiar symptoms such as flashing lights.

Precisely why we get cluster headaches is a mystery though some scientists believe that they arise out of an abnormality of the hypothalamus, which is the gland which controls the body clock and is influenced by changes in the length of the day and a number of other things.

Yet another notable difference between cluster headaches and migraines is the gender of sufferers. With migraine headaches about three quarters of the nearly 28 million sufferers in the US alone are women and just one quarter are men. In the case of cluster headaches by contrast about eight out of ten sufferers are men.

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

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

Yet another relatively good treatment is that of taking a class of drugs called triptans which are commonly used for the treatment of migraines. In this case however the drug must be given in the form of a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove far from easy because cluster headaches can sometimes produce swelling in the nasal passages. When this is the case then the drug can also be effective if it is given in the form of an injection. This again is a treatment that needs to be given after the headache has appeared.

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

In severe cases surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures can be carried out but this is very much a last resort and it is not always wholly effective.