Despite the fact that they are rather uncommon cluster headaches are said to be one of the most painful things that you can experience. Luckily they are fairly rare and, while other frequently painful headaches such as migraines affect roughly ten percent of the population, less than one third of one percent suffer from cluster headaches. Many people describe cluster headaches as being much worse than migraines and a lot of women describe them as also being more painful than giving birth.
Cluster headaches, which frequently present as a sharp stabbing pain behind one eye or near the area of the temple, are distinguished by the fact that they generally appear at regular times. This means that they have a tendency to attack at a specific time of day, last for an hour or less, and then re-appear at the same time the following day with this pattern repeating itself 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 such as flashing lights.
Just why we get cluster headaches remains a mystery although some researchers think that they result from an abnormality of the hypothalamus, which is a small gland which regulates the body's biological clock and is influenced by changes in the length of the day amongst a number of other things.
Another striking difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. In the case of migraine headaches roughly three quarters of the nearly 28 million sufferers in the United States alone are women and just one quarter are men. When it comes to cluster headaches however about eight out of ten sufferers are men.
Traditional treatments for normal or migraine headaches are generally of little use for cluster headaches and once miracle drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen have little if any impact.
One treatment which has been demonstrated to be fairly effective is inhaling pure oxygen. Of course this type of treatment cannot be delivered until after the headache has arrived but the inhalation of pure oxygen for a severa minutes will frequently relief the pain of the headache considerably.
Another reasonably effective treatment is that of taking a class of drugs known as triptans which are regularly used for the treatment of migraines. Here however the drug had to be given as a nasal spray to be effective and this can be far from easy as cluster headaches can sometimes produce swelling in the nasal passages. If this happens then the drug may also be effective if given by injection. Once more this is a treatment which has to be used after the headache has appeared.
Since cluster headaches appear with a pattern it would be especially useful to have some sort of preventative medicine which could be used regularly just before a headache appears. Unhappily however because the condition is so rare and is not well understood we do not have much information about which drugs might or might not be an effective form of preventative treatment.
In extreme cases of cluster headaches surgery to block nerves and other neurological procedures may be carried out but this is very much a last resort and it is not always entirely effective.
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