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Posts Tagged ‘Cluster Headache’

Pain behind the eyes may be a symptom of different types of headaches and even other health problems. Most commonly people complain to have an extreme one-sided headache especially involving the area around or behind one eye. This is a typical description of cluster headache. Other symptoms associated with cluster headache are eye redness or tearing, smaller pupil on the affected side of the face and stuffy, runny nose.

Cluster headaches are very severe and last from 25 minutes to a couple of hours. They may recur several times a day for up to 8 weeks and than disappear for a few months or even years.

One of the most effective and safest treatments for cluster headaches is oxygen mask that raises levels of oxygen in the blood and as a result relaxes constricted blood vessels. If that does not help injections of sumatriphan and dihydroergotamine may provide relief from the headache behind the eyes.

Over-the-counter painkillers are not a good alternative for relieving pain as headaches often goes away before the pill starts working.

Both cluster headaches and migraines are considered vascular headaches and are linked to abnormal function of brain’s blood vessels due to hormonal chemical change in the brain. Since those two types of headaches are closely linked together, during migraines, headache may start in the area surrounding one or both eyes.

Migraine headache often begins with visual disturbance called “aura” (a person is seeing zigzag lines or flashing lights or have blurred vision). Later migraine is often accompanied with such symptoms as vomiting, fatigue, nausea, sensitivity to lights and loud sounds.

People suffering from cluster or migraine headaches should avoid use of alcohol and tobacco, certain foods, especially the ones containing nitrates (food coloring, processed meats, preservatives), bright and glaring light, stress and certain medications that lead to hormonal changes (oral contraceptives, estrogens).

Sometimes infection of the frontal sinuses can lead to a dull, throbbing pain between or behind the eyes. It tends to get worse in the mornings and is accompanied with frequent tearing, congestion, runny nose, fever and sensitivity to light. Diving in dirty water, airborne allergies, cold or flu may cause sinus headache.

To eliminate pain behind the eyes, you should reduce inflammation and sinus swelling. Inhaling steam and applying heat over affected area combined with Vitamin C and zinc intake will facilitate the mucus drainage and help to boost immune mechanism to reduce sinus headache.

Other factors that can be the main reason for the headaches behind the eyes are eyestrain and glaucoma. Eyestrain occurs if the eyes are forced to focus on a close object (a newspaper, computer screen) for a long period of time, without focusing periodically at distant objects or due to uncorrected vision problems.

Glaucoma is caused by increased pressure within the eyeball that requires immediate medical attention as it may lead to optic nerve damage and loss of sight. Nowadays glaucoma may be treated by prescription drugs or surgery.

The cluster headache has two main characteristics. First, the cluster headache is extremely painful. The pain is so intense that some sufferers even feel that the condition is life threatening, which it is not. The second characteristic is the cyclical nature of the cluster headache. They tend to come a certain times and then last for several weeks or months and then disappear, sometimes for years,only to return again. So, before seeking cluster headache treatment, be sure that it is indeed what you are suffering from.

The best cluster headache treatment available is abortive oxygen treatment. The patient inhales pure oxygen through a mask for several minutes until the pain is gone. This treatment is very successful for many sufferers. Often, through oxygen inhalation the pain will be gone after just a few minutes. For others the relief may only be temporary and return after the sufferer stops inhaling the oxygen.

The only problem with the use of oxygen in cluster headache treatment is the inconvenience. Oxygen tanks are bulky, heavy and difficult to carry around with you. Many people are able to have them in their home in preparation for the onset of an attack. However, attacks may come when driving or while at work. Unless you purchase apparatus for home, car and work, then oxygen cluster headache treatment may not be always be available to you.

There are also some pharmaceutical options for cluster headache treatment. Imitrex (sumatriptan) is an injection that is often used to treat migraine headaches but has also been found to be effective with cluster headaches. Imitrex has side effects that the sufferer will want to consider together with their doctor before using this option.

There is also an IV drug that can be used for cluster headache treatment. It’s called dihydroergotamine and requires the sufferer to go to the doctor’s office to have the drug administered intravenously. This headache remedy is likewise very inconvenient because it requires a visit to the doctor’s office.

Consider the Cause of Your Headaches

Remember that even though we must depend on doctors to help us with cluster headache treatment, they aren’t always successful at diagnosing illnesses. What may have all the symptoms of a cluster headache may in fact be something entirely different. For example, some foods cause headaches in some people. If you eat these foods occasionally, then the headaches they cause you may behave like cluster headaches, coming and going in episodes. Or, some foods may cause you headaches only some of the time. Since the pain would come in episodes the headaches would appear to be of the cluster variety.

If you are diagnosed with having cluster headaches, you should listen to your doctor, however don’t give up experimenting with your diet to see if some foods may actually be the cause. Or, if something you are eating is not causing the headaches, it could be making them more painful.

Finally, are you out of shape and don’t eat healthily? Even though exercise and diet are not scientifically established causes of cluster headaches, I would definitely consider exercising more and eating better if I was consistently in a lot of pain. It is my sneaking suspicion that a lot of ailments are the result of a poor lifestyle and not just inevitable and unlucky occurrences we have no control over.

It can be a horrible experience, and we would all like to avoid them – but the truth is most of the general population have had some sort of headache, at some time in their lives.

But spare a thought for those who are worse off!

A significant part of the population experience severe, often incapacitating headache such as Migraine or Cluster Headache – or they have frequent headaches, such as “Chronic Daily Headache”, that not only affect the quality of their lives but also their productivity.

If you’re one of these people, you’re not alone – and there are many ways to treat or manage these conditions, and finding the right treatment for you requires taking a logical approach.

In Medicine the logical, step-by-step approach that medical practitioners take to diagnose and treat symptoms is called a “Diagnostic Pathway”.

It’s very useful in many conditions, but none more so than in the management of headache because, as a headache sufferer, your involvement in the Diagnostic Pathway substantially affects your ability to receive the right treatment.

This is because diagnosis of headache is usually dependent solely on the verbal history you give to your doctor – and the clearer that is given, the better.

In making a headache diagnosis, one of the most important key features is the frequency of the headache. That is, how often in a period of time (say, in one month) the headache occurs.

On the basis of this, your treating doctor will begin by categorizing the headache into one of two categories – the first step towards developing an appropriate treatment.

These can include “Episodic” headaches – those occurring on less than 15 days of the month on average; and “Chronic” headaches – those occurring, on average, on more than half the days of the month.

From that point, your medical practitioner is more easily able to diagnose your headache.

The most common “Episodic” headaches are Migraine, Episodic Tension Headache, Cluster Headache.

“Chronic” headaches include Chronic Tension Type Headache, New Daily Persistent Headache, Transformed Migraine(or Chronic Migraine) and Hemicrania Continua.

This is why it’s so valuable to keep a dairy of the number of headache attacks per month – because it’s of such value for the medical practitioner when the patient comes for the initial consultation.

It’s the beginning of a logical, step-by-step approach to not only making the correct diagnosis, but planning the correct treatment for the headache sufferer.

The first step in treating a headache patient is making a headache diagnosis. No headache is ‘just a headache’ and each headache type needs a specific management strategy.

One of the easiest ways to correctly define and diagnose headache is by frequency, this immediately putting it into either the Episodic or the Chronic category. From there on, the features of headache will define exactly what type of headache it is.

Unlike (say) a skin rash, the nature of a headache means it’s often difficult to assess the symptoms without the patient’s own verbal input into the diagnosis.

This is why your involvement, as a patient, is so important to headache diagnosis.