Word: braine
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...vascular conditions, like pneumonia or post-partum infection. "This lends credibility to the vascular mechanism of migraines," says lead researcher Cheryl Bushnell, an assistant professor in neurology at Duke. It's also generally recognized that the pain of a migraine headache is caused by dilated blood vessels in the brain...
...rapidly. Now physicians have at their disposal a growing arsenal of headache drugs--medications that can stop an accelerating migraine in its tracks, reduce the risk of recurrence or, in some cases, keep one from happening in the first place--but scientists are starting to uncover subtle defects in brain chemistry and electrophysiology that lead not just tomigraines but to all kinds of headaches. Indeed, many neurologists now believe that mostseverely disabling headaches are actually migraines in disguise and so are more likely to respond to migraine medications than to standard analgesics such asaspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen...
...back as the 1600s, the prominent English physician Thomas Willis suggested that headaches are caused by a rapid increase in the flow of blood to the brain. He theorized that the suddenly bulging blood vessels put pressure on nearby nerves and that these in turn trigger the pain. A variation on Willis' idea became the favored explanation for the cause of migraines. (An important network of blood vessels at the base of the brain bears Willis' name...
...things have occurred in the past couple of decades to alter that view. First, several imaging techniques were developed that allowed doctors to study blood flow in the living brain. Second, scientists learned a great deal more about the nerve endings that are embedded in the dura mater, the fibrous outer covering of the brain. Armed with these tools and that information, researchers concluded that the order of events in a migraine is not as straightforward as they had been taught. The nerve endings in the dura mater appear to act first, releasing proteins that cause the blood vessels...
Tracing the pathway of the affected nerve endings deeper into the brain led researchers to the trigeminal nerve, a complex network of nerve fibers that ferries sensory signals from the face, jaws and top of the forehead to the brain. During the course of a migraine, scientists discovered, the trigeminal nerve practically floods the brain with pain signals. The more researchers learn about the trigeminal nerve, the more they believe that it is involved in all types of primary headaches, including tension and cluster headaches. The differences in the headache types seem to stem from what activates the trigeminal nerve...