Word: painfulness
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...revolutionary view of extreme headaches that treats them as serious, biologically based disorders on a par with epilepsy or Alzheimer's disease. "Before, patients got shipped around from doctor to doctor until eventually they wound up at a psychologist," says Dr. Joel Saper, director of the Michigan Head-Pain and Neurological Institute in Ann Arbor. Now their headaches are seen as the result of wayward circuits and molecules, not personality disorders...
...mercifully uncommon cluster headache, so named because an attack typically repeats itself, often daily, with each episode lasting anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. Cluster headaches usually strike their victims, generally men, at fixed times of the year. The pain is so searing that they are also known as suicide headaches. Immediate treatment with oxygen and migraine drugs given intravenously can sometimes provide relief...
Somewhere between tension and cluster headaches are migraines. Typically, the pain from a migraine is a throbbing one, restricted to one side of the head, that gets worse with movement and lasts from four hours to three days. Migraines are usually accompanied by either nausea and vomiting, as they were for TV producer Schipper, or extreme sensitivity to both light and sound. By contrast, patients suffering from tension-type headaches may react badly to either light or sound but not both...
...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...
...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 and how it responds...