Introduction
Most people are familiar with headaches, the all too common affliction marked by throbbing, piercing, or vise-like pain around much or a part of the head. There are many different kinds of headaches, and they range from being an infrequent annoyance to a persistent, severe, and disabling medical condition.
The brain itself is insensitive to pain, so that is not what hurts when a headache arises. Rather, the pain occurs in the following locations:
- The tissues covering the brain.
- The attaching structures at the base of the brain.
- Muscles and blood vessels around the scalp, face, and neck.
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It should be noted, however, that the sources for this pain are in the brain itself or are unknown.
Doctors categorize headaches as either primary or secondary, which helps to distinguish the many different kinds of headaches and to determine appropriate treatments for each.
Primary Headaches
A headache is considered primary when a disease or other medical condition does not cause it. Most primary headaches fall into three main types: tension-type, migraine, and cluster headaches.
- Tension headache is the most common primary headache and accounts for 90% of all headaches.
- Migraines are the second most frequently occurring primary headaches. It is referred to as a neurovascular headache because it is most likely caused by an interaction between blood vessel and nerve abnormalities.
- Cluster headache is a less common type of primary headache. Although it is sometimes referred to as a neurovascular headache, evidence now suggests that its cause lies in the hypothalamus, a region deep in the brain that regulates, among other functions, the biologic rhythms of the body.
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