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Headache - Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

Definition

Headache is a term used to describe aching or pain that occurs in one or more areas of the head, face, mouth, or neck. Some people say the pain is like a band slowly tightening around their head. Others describe pain that worsens when someone turns on a light. Both are descriptions of headaches.

There are four types of headache : -

Vascular
Muscle contraction (tension)
Traction and Inflammatory
The most common type of vascular headache is migraine.

Causes

About 90% of the headaches are tension headaches. Tension headaches are usually caused by the contracting of the layer of muscle around your skull, which in turn can decrease blood flow to your head. That's why we will feel a band of pressure around our head, and that steady pain typical in tension headaches.
The pain of a classic migraine headache may be described as intense, throbbing, or pounding and is felt in the forehead, temple, ear, jaw, or around the eye. Classic migraine starts on one side of the head but may eventually spread to the other side. An attack lasts 1 to 2 pain-wracked days.
Cluster headaches frequent, short-lived (less than an hour), one-sided headaches across the temple or around the eye and occurring once or more a day, and often disrupting sleep. Headaches recur for several weeks then subside, although another cluster may develop months later.

Treatment

When headaches occur three or more times a month, preventive treatment is usually recommended. Drug therapy, biofeedback training, stress reduction, and elimination of certain foods from the diet are the most common methods of preventing and controlling migraine and other vascular headaches.

Headache treatment often depends on their type, the severity, and the frequency of occurrence. In many cases, tension headache can be effectively treated using conservative measures, such as lifestyle modifications (e.g., improvements in diet and sleep patterns) and over-the-counter pain relievers (e.g., acetaminophen, ibuprofen). Cluster headache and migraine headache may require prescription medications and preventative (prophylactic) treatment.

The majority of patients with cluster headache can be controlled on medication. However, a small number of patients have a chronic form of cluster headache which is resistant to medical therapy and therefore very difficult to treat.