Exactly What Is A Cluster Headache And How Do We Go About Treating It?

Despite the fact that they are somewhat uncommon cluster headaches are classed as being one of the most painful conditions which you can experience. Fortunately they are reasonably uncommon and, whilst other frequently painful headaches like migraines strike about ten percent of the population, less than one in three hundred people suffer from cluster headaches. The majority of people describe cluster headaches as being far worse than a migraine and many women describe them as also being more painful than giving birth.Cluster headaches, which normally present as a stabbing pain behind one eye or near the temple, are characterized by the fact that they generally occur at regular times. In other words they have a tendency to strike at a specific time of day, last for an hour or less, and then strike again at the same time the next day with this pattern repeating for several weeks, months or even longer. Additionally, cluster headaches have a tendency to hit without any warning and are unlike migraines which are frequently preceded by familiar symptoms like flashing lights.Precisely why we suffer from cluster headaches remains a mystery although some researchers believe that they are the result of an abnormality in the hypothalamus, which is a small gland which controls the body's biological clock and is affected by changes in the length of the day amongst other things.Yet another notable difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. In the case of 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 however about eight out of ten sufferers are men.Standard treatments for ordinary or migraine headaches are normally useless for cluster headaches and once miracle drugs such as ibuprofen and aspirin have virtually no effect.One treatment which has been demonstrated to be quite effective is inhaling pure oxygen. Of course this treatment cannot be used until after the headache has arrived but inhaling pure oxygen for a severa 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 regularly used for the treatment of migraines. In this case however the drug needs to be administered as a nasal spray to be effective and this can be far from easy as cluster headaches will sometimes cause swelling in 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 again this is a form of treatment which has to be given after the headache has appeared.As cluster headaches appear with a pattern it would be particularly useful to have some form of preventative medication which could be taken regularly shortly before a headache appears. Unhappily however as the condition is so uncommon and is not 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 extreme cases surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures can be performed althoughthis ought to be viewed as very much a last resort and it is not always entirely effective.