What are Cluster Headaches and How do I Treat Them?
What Are Cluster Headaches? They are not the same as migraines.
ClusterHeadaches.com Says: A Cluster headache has a prevalence of approximately 69 cases per 100,000 people, and is therefore far less common that migraine (D’Alessandro et al, 1986). Men are affected more commonly than women in a proportion of 6:1. Although most patients begin experiencing headache between the ages of 20 and 50 years (mean, 30 years), the syndrome may begin as early as the first decade and as late as the eighth decade. Clearly, age alone is an insensitive diagnostic criterion (Krabbe, 1986). Women with cluster headache are more likely than men to begin experiencing attacks after the age of 50; among women, headaches usually do not correlate with menses, are likely to cease during pregnancy (Ekbom and Waldenlind, 1981), and may be initiated by use of oral contraception (Peatfield et al, 1982).
Characteristics of the Pain:
The pain of a cluster headache commences quickly, without warning, and reaches a crescendo within 2 to 15 minutes. It is often excruciating in intensity, and is deep, nonfluctuating, and explosive in quality; only occasionally is it pulsatile. In addition, 10 to 20 percent of patients report superimposed paroxysms of stabbing, icepick-like pains in the periorbital region that last for a few seconds and may occur once or several times in rapid succession; this paroxysmal pain usually heralds the end of an attack. The symptoms resolve in 1 to 2 minutes (Ekbom, 1975).
The pain usually begins in, around, or above the eye or the temple (Fig. 6-3); occasionally the face, neck, ear, or hemicranium may be affected (Sutherland and Eadie, 1972). It is always unilateral, and generally affects the same side in subsequent bouts. However, it may shift to the corresponding region of the opposite side in 15 percent of patients (Manzoni et al, 1983b), usually for the duration of a bout, less often switching sides within a bout. Many patients prefer to be upright and active when an attack is in progress, but this is reported with a frequency that is not high enough to be useful diagnostically (Russell, 1981). Attacks last from 30 minutes to 2 hours (mean of 45 minutes) in about 75 percent of cases.
Please See ClusterHeadaches.com for more information.
Wikipedia Says: Cluster headaches are rare, extremely painful and debilitating headaches that occur in groups or clusters.
Cluster headache sufferers typically experience very severe headaches of a piercing quality near one eye or temple that last for fifteen minutes to three hours. The headaches can be unilateral and occasionally change sides.
Cluster headaches are frequently associated with drooping eyelids, conjunctival injection (which results in red, watery eyes), tearing, constricted pupil, eyelid edema, nasal congestion, runny nose, and sweating on the affected side of the face. The neck is often stiff or tender in association with cluster headaches, and jaw and teeth pain is sometimes reported.
The location and type of pain has been compared to a “brain-freeze” headache from rapidly drinking or eating something very cold like an ice cream; this analogy is limited, but may offer some insight into the cluster headache experience. Persons who have experienced both cluster headaches and other painful conditions (childbirth, migraines) report that the pain of cluster headaches is far worse, sometimes 100 times more severe than a migraine [1]. One analogy is that of a burning ice pick being repeatedly stabbed through the eye into the brain. It has been reported as the most severe pain known to medical science, worse than amputation without anesthetics.
During an attack, the person is restless and cannot sit still and may pace or even become severely agitated. Sensitivity to light is more typical of a migraine, as is vomiting, but they can be present in some sufferers of cluster headache.
Cluster headaches are occasionally referred to as “alarm clock headaches”, as they can occur at night and wake a person from sleep at the same time each night or at a certain period after falling asleep, or strike at percisely the same time during the day a week later. This has prompted researchers to speculate an involvement of the brains “biological clock” or circadian rhythm. Other synonyms for cluster headache include Horton’s syndrome and “suicide headaches” (a reference to the excruciating pain and resulting desperation that has culiminated in actual suicide).
In episodic cluster headache, these attacks occur once or more daily, often at the same times each day, for a period of several weeks, followed by a headache-free period lasting weeks, months, or years. Approximately 10–15% of cluster headache sufferers are chronic; they can experience multiple headaches every day for years.
Episodic or chronic: Cluster headaches occurring in two or more cluster periods lasting from 7 to 365 days with a pain-free remission of one month or longer between the clusters are considered episodic. If the attacks occur for more than a year without a pain-free remission of at least one month, the condition is considered chronic. [2] The condition may change from chronic to episodic and from episodic to chronic. Remission periods lasting for decades before the resumption of clusters have been known to occur.
Prevalence: While migraines are diagnosed more often in women, cluster headaches are diagnosed in men at a rate 2.5 to 3 times greater than in women. This gap between the sexes has narrowed over the past few decades, and it is not clear whether cluster headaches are becoming more frequent in women, or whether they are merely being better diagnosed. Between 1 and 4 people per thousand experience cluster headaches in the U.S. and Western Europe; statistics for other parts of the world are fragmentary. Latitude plays a role in the occurrence of cluster headaches, which are more common as one moves away from the equator towards the poles. It is believed that greater changes in day length are responsible for the increase.
Treatments:
For The Acute Attack: (Please seek a Doctors Guidence before taking any of these treatments) Ergotamine, Oxygen, Lidocaine, Dihydroergotamine, Methoxyflurane, Prednisone, Methysergide, Lithium, Pizotifen, Cyproheptadine, Indomethacin, & Phenylpropanolamine
There is massive ammounts of information on these treatments at ClusterHeadaches.com
Links:
Cluster Headache Support Group
OUCH.com
