Headaches

For six years, Lee J. Nelson searched in vain for the cause of the unrelenting headache centered like a bull’s-eye above the bridge of his nose. He consulted nearly 60 doctors, none of whom could find a physical explanation for his pain. He took 100 different medications, but even powerful narcotics brought no more than temporary relief. One doctor who considered his headache a symptom of severe depression suggested electroshock; a specialist at Johns Hopkins proposed last-ditch brain surgery reserved for intractable psychiatric problems. So the day in 2003 that the Northern Virginia consultant found the answer to his baffling and rare medical problem in a 40-year-old article in the National Library of Medicine, he was overcome. “It described patients just like me,” Nelson recalled. “I started crying.” For Nelson, now 55, and his wife, Neta, an executive at a … Read more

FINDINGS: Researchers found that Tai Chi, a traditional Chinese low-impact mind-body exercise, provided significant health benefits for adults suffering from tension headaches. Compared with a control group, patients who participated in a 15-week Tai Chi program were helped not only with headache pain, but also perceived improvement in other areas, reporting increased energy, emotional well-being, social functioning and improved mental health. IMPACT: According to researchers, Tai Chi’s emphasis on relaxation, breathing and coordination may address stress, the underlying cause of the pain associated with tension headaches. The patients who participated in the Tai Chi program showed improvement on a quality-of-life based measurement called SF-36 and also on a test called HIT-6TM designed to capture the effect of headaches. The source of this article is http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/69218.php 

According to preliminary results of an ongoing study at Columbus Children’s Hospital, to be presented at the American Headache Society’s June meeting in Chicago, parents of adolescents with migraines may have an influence on the level of pain reported. Approximately 10 percent of children and adolescents get migraines, and as many as two percent suffer from chronic migraines, meaning 15 or more headaches a month. Nearly nine times out of 10, those kids come from families who have a history of migraines, and although the migraines may be shared, researchers aren’t convinced the pain is necessarily the same. “We want to know how much of a child’s response to migraine pain is learned and how much is hereditary,” said lead author Ann Pakalnis, MD, a neurologist at Columbus Children’s and a faculty member of The Ohio State University College of … Read more

Migraines and chronic headaches are wide-spread phenomena. Twelve percent of the population, three quarters of them women, suffer at least occasionally from migraines and about 5 percent from chronic headaches. New effective methods of treatment were presented at the Congress of the European Neurological Society (ENS) in Rhodos. According to Greek researchers, migraine sufferers can eliminate symptoms altogether if they take higher doses of anti-migraine medicine for a longer period of time than is now customary. Another team of researchers has found that certain psychopharmaceuticals could serve as a new therapy option for persistent chronic headaches. Twelve percent of the population, three quarters of them women, suffer at least bouts of migraines, that much-feared type of paroxysmal pulsating headache that generally occurs in just one half of the skull and is accompanied by unpleasant symptoms like nausea and vomiting, dizziness … Read more

Migraine sufferers report worse health-related quality of life than the general population and have similar health status scores as people with debilitating chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease. A recent study, “Migraine frequency and health utilities: findings from a multi-site survey,” published in Value in Health, surveyed 150 migraine patients in the U.S. to study how migraine frequency affects quality of life. The study was co-authored by Jeffrey Brown, PhD (Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care), Peter J. Neumann, ScD (Tufts-New England Medical Center Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy), George Papadopoulos (Schering-Plough Corporation), Gary Ruoff, MD (Westside Family Medical Center), Merle Diamond, MD (Diamond Headache Clinic), and Joseph Menzin, PhD (Boston Health Economics, Inc.). The lead author, Dr. Brown, says, “We found that 45% of patients reported that their migraines were moderately or very disruptive to … Read more