• Question: How do we get headaches?

    Asked by coolguyjr to Alastair, Hywel, Keith on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Hywel Vaughan

      Hywel Vaughan answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Good question coolguy, and one that I’m sure a lot of people want to know the answer to!
      The truth is that there are many different causes to headaches, but they can generally be split into three types…
      1) Tension headaches are effected by muscle strain on the neck and sometimes even emotional stress – this can also be triggered by eye strain (like staring at a computer screen for too long!)
      2) Cluster headaches are a bit of an unknown one – they occur repeatedly over a period of time, but we still don’t know exactly what causes them… it could be to do with blood flow.
      3) Finally, migraines… these can be caused by a reduced blood flow to certain areas of your brain, and is thought to be linked to something called serotonin – a neurotransmitter that binds to various receptors in your head 🙂

    • Photo: Keith Brain

      Keith Brain answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      You know, I had to look this up, because I thought that I knew the answer – but I keep hearing different things, and now I’m confused. When I’m trying to look something up for work (not worth trusting Wikipedia when something is really important), most medical scientists (and anyone working in biomedicine) will turn to an index of scientific articles called Pubmed, which you can get to freely online at:
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/
      From here, we can do all sorts of searches for articles that other scientists have published in “peer reviewed” journals. This means that each of the articles has been independently checked by 2-5 experienced scientists with experience in the same field, so it is generally more trustworthy than something we might find on the net. However, it isn’t aimed at the general public, so it can be difficult to follow.

      There are many different types of headache, but the commonest is called a “tension-type headache”. The usual source of the pain isn’t in the brain, or the lining of the brain (the meninges), but in the muscles of the head and neck outside the skull. These muscles become tense, often in association with some form of stress, “eye strain”, sleep deprivation or due to many other causes. Despite being very common, the details of how all of this comes about and why it is so sustained, are not very clear at all.

      There are other rarer types of headaches, like migraines (where there is a migrating pattern of blood vessel contraction in the linings of the brain) and very severe “thunderclap” headaches due to bleeding into the brain, or “cluster headaches” (related to some problem with a particular nerve in the head called the trigeminal nerve). So, there are lots of different types of headache, but the commonest type of all (tension-type headaches) is the one that least in known about – very frustrating!

Comments

  • Photo: lupusmortii

    lupusmortii commented on :

    one of the types of headache can be caused by the blood vessels swelling in order to warm up your brain that is what brain freeze is

  • Photo: Keith

    Keith commented on :

    Lupusmortii – not sure I’ve come across brain freeze before … The brain has quite a good blood supply, and is well insultated in the skull (made of thick bone). The circulation to the outside of the head (the scalp) is almost completely separate to that of the brain, so not wearing a hat in cold weather doesn’t cause the blood to the brain to cool any more than it cools blood going to the rest of the body. So I can’t figure this one out.

    Hywel – nice one – you’ll do me out of a job next!