Although they are pretty uncommon cluster headaches are regarded as being as one of the most painful conditions you can experience. Happily they are reasonably uncommon and, while other frequently painful headaches like migraines attack about 10 percent of the population, under one in three hundred people suffer from cluster headaches. Most people describe cluster headaches as much worse than a migraine and some women describe them as also being more painful than having a baby.



Cluster headaches, which normally appear as a sharp stabbing pain behind one eye or near the area of the temple, are characterized by the fact that they normally occur at regular times. This means that they have a tendency to strike at a particular time of the day, last for an hour or less, and then re-appear at the same time the following day with this pattern repeating itself for several weeks or even months. Also, cluster headaches have a tendency to hit without warning and are unlike migraines which are frequently preceded by familiar symptoms like flashing lights.

Exactly why we suffer from cluster headaches remains something of a mystery though some researchers believe that they are the result of an abnormality in the hypothalamus, which is a small gland which regulates the body clock and is influenced by alterations to the length of the day as well as a number of other things.

A further significant difference between cluster headaches and migraines is the gender of sufferers. With migraine headaches about three quarters of the some twenty-eight million sufferers in the US alone are women while only one quarter are men. In the case of cluster headaches by contrast between eighty and ninety percent of sufferers are men.

Treatments for ordinary or migraine headaches are generally ineffective for cluster headaches and such once miracle drugs as aspirin and ibuprofen have little if any impact.

One treatment that has been shown to be quite effective is the inhalation of pure oxygen. Of course this treatment cannot be used until after the headache has arrived but the inhalation of pure oxygen for a few minutes will frequently relief the pain of the headache noticeably.

A further reasonably effective treatment is that of taking a class of drugs called triptans which are regularly used for the treatment of migraines. Here however the drug must be given in the form of a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove difficult because cluster headaches will sometimes cause swelling in the nasal passages. If this happens then the drug may also be effective if it is given in the form of an injection. This again is a form of treatment that has to be used once the headache has appeared.

As cluster headaches attack with a clear pattern it would be useful to have some form of preventative medicine which could be used regularly shortly before a headache appears. Unhappily however as the condition is so unusual and is not at all well understood we do not have much data about which drugs may or may not be an effective form of preventative treatment.

In extreme cases surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures may be carried out althoughthis ought to be viewed as very much a last resort and is not always terribly effective.