Medical Health Encyclopedia

Timing of an Attack: Headache attacks tend to occur with great regularity at the same time of day. About 75% occur between 9 at night and 10 in the morning. Peaks have also been reported between 1 PM and 3 PM.

Duration of an Attack. A single cluster attack is usually brief but extremely painful, lasting about one to three hours. (In one study the average attack lasted 72 minutes.)

Number of Attacks per Day During the Cycle: During an active cycle, sufferers can experience these attacks as infrequently as one every other day to several attacks a day.

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Duration of a Cycle: Cycles of such daily or near daily attacks typically occur over the course of a week to a year--most often in spring and autumn. Usually a patient has one or two cycles per year that each last one to three months. (In one study of cluster headache suffers, most individuals experienced one cycle a year that lasted on average about eight and half weeks.)

Headache-Free Remissions Between Cycles: Such cycles are followed by headache-free periods lasting at least fourteen days, and often for many months. Sustained remissions may last as long as 20 years.

OTHER PRIMARY HEADACHES

Migraine Headache: General Description of Its Course

Migraine is now recognized as a chronic illness, not simply as a headache. They are often classified by whether auras accompany them or not:

• Common migraines are without auras. About 75% of migraines are the common type.
• Classic migraines are those with auras.

A person may experience one or the other at different times. In general, there are four symptom phases to a migraine (although they may not all occur in every patient): the prodrome, auras, the attack, and the postdrome phase.

Prodrome. The prodrome phase is a group of vague symptoms that may precede a migraine attack by several hours, or even a day or two. Such prodrome symptoms can include the following:

• Sensitivity to light or sound.
• Changes in appetite.
• Fatigue and yawning.
• Malaise.
• Mood changes.
• Food cravings.