Despite the fact that they are fairly uncommon cluster headaches are said to be amongst the most painful conditions you can experience. Fortunately they are quite rare and, whilst other frequently painful headaches like migraines strike approximately 10 percent of the population, less than one in three hundred people suffer from cluster headaches. Many people describe cluster headaches as being much worse than migraines and many women say that they are more painful than child birth.



Cluster headaches, which generally appear as a stabbing pain behind one eye or close to the area of the temple, are distinguished by the fact that they often occur at regular times. This means that they tend to attack at a specific time of day, last for an hour or less, and then strike again at the same time the following day with this pattern repeating for several weeks or even months. Additionally, cluster headaches have a tendency to hit without warning and are unlike migraines which are frequently preceded by symptoms like flashing lights.

Just why we get cluster headaches remains something of a mystery although some researchers think that they are the result of an abnormality in the hypothalamus, which is the gland which controls the body's biological clock and is influenced by changes in the length of the day as well as other things.

A further striking difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. With migraine headaches approximately three quarters of the almost 28 million sufferers in the US alone are women while just one quarter are men. When it comes to cluster headaches by contrast approximately 8 out of 10 sufferers are men.

Standard treatments for ordinary or migraine headaches are normally useless for cluster headaches and once miracle drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen have virtually no impact.

One treatment that has been shown to be quite effective is inhaling pure oxygen. This form of treatment cannot of course be delivered until after the headache has arrived but the inhalation of pure oxygen for a severa minutes will frequently relief the pain of the headache noticeably.

A further relatively effective treatment is the use of a class of drugs called triptans which are regularly used for the treatment of migraines. In this case however the drug must be administered as a nasal spray to be effective and this can be difficult because cluster headaches will sometimes cause swelling in the nasal passages. When this happens then the drug can also be effective if it is given by injection. Once more this is a form of treatment that needs to be given once the headache has appeared.

As cluster headaches appear with a pattern it would be especially useful to have some form of preventative medication which could be taken regularly just before a headache appears. Unhappily however as the condition is so unusual and is not well understood we do not have much information about which drugs might or might not be an effective form of preventative treatment.

In severe cases surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures can be carried out althoughthis is very much a last resort and it is not always entirely effective.