Cluster headaches, which frequently appear as a sharp stabbing pain behind one eye or near the temple, are distinguished by the fact that they frequently occur at regular times. In other words they have a tendency to attack at a specific time of day, last for an hour or less, and then attack again 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 differ from migraines which are sometimes preceded by symptoms such as flashing lights.
Just why we suffer from cluster headaches remains a mystery though some scientists believe that they result from an abnormality of the hypothalamus, which is a small gland that regulates the body's biological clock and is influenced by alterations to the length of the day as well as a number of other things.
Another significant difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. In the case of migraine headaches approximately three quarters of the almost twenty-eight million sufferers in the United States alone are women while just one quarter are men. When it comes to cluster headaches however between eighty and ninety percent of sufferers are men.
Traditional treatments for ordinary or migraine headaches are generally of little use for cluster headaches and once miracle drugs such as ibuprofen and aspirin have little if any effect.
One treatment which has been shown to be quite 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 often ease the headache considerably.
Another relatively good treatment is that of taking a class of drugs called triptans that are regularly used to treat migraines. In this case however the drug must be given as a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove far from easy as cluster headaches can sometimes produce swelling in the nasal passages. When this happens then the drug may also be effective if it is given by injection. Once more this is a treatment which needs to be used once the headache has appeared.
Since cluster headaches attack with such regularity it would be useful to have some sort of preventative medicine that could be taken regularly just before a headache appears. Unhappily however as the condition is so rare and is not at all well understood we have very little data about which drugs may or may not be effective as preventative treatment.
In extreme cases surgery to block nerves and other neurological procedures may be performed althoughthis should be seen as very much a last resort and it is not always wholly effective.
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