• Question: how are headaches caused?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 22 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      Headaches are caused by disturbances in pain sensitive structures in the head. It can be caused by different reasons – some of them are

      Vascular headaches – are due to blood vessel swelling in the brain such as migranes.

      Myogenic headaches – these are muscular and happens when your head muscles become tight.

      Inflammatory headaches – this is when a lot of inflammatory cells (cells that cause swelling and treat infections) come to the head such as sinus headaches

      You can find more information about headaches at this page – http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/headache/Pages/Introduction.aspx

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      Many people think that headaches are caused by the brain hurting – this is not true, as the brain doesn’t have any sensors for pain. Instead, the pain comes from the muscles of the head and neck area, and the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord (known as meninges). Headaches can be classed as primary (not associated with another condition – the vascular and mygenic headaches that Ramya mentions are types of these), or secondary (due to some other condition). Generally, secondary headaches go away when you treat the condition causing it – for example an infection, or sinusitis.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      The other type of headache not yet mentioned is the dreaded brain freez – when you eat too much ice cream you can get a painful headache.

      This is caused when a nerve in the roof of your mouth detects a large amount of cold. An over reaction occurs and it leads to the blood vessels around you brain swelling, to try and increase the brains temperature. How this actually occurs is still not fully understood, but if you want to avoid getting brain freeze don’t let your ice cream touch the roof of your mouth.

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