Headaches are complicated and can be of different types and due to different reasons. Each has its own set of symptoms and treatments. For treating it well, one must first diagnose the type of headache he or she is suffering from. There are usually 150 kinds of headaches, however, the most common type of headaches are tension headache, migraine headache, cluster headache, chronic daily headache, sinus headache, post-trauma headache, and so on. Let’s take a deep dive into migraine headaches.

 

Migraine Headaches

Migraine Headaches are often severe headaches where the patient feels pounding pain in their head, which may last from 4 hours to 3 days and could occur about four times in a month. With a headache, the person may also experience sensitivity to light, noise and smells and have an upset stomach. Sometimes, it’s also accompanied by fever and belly pain.

Symptoms of Migraine

Migraine often follows four stages that are prodrome, aura, attack and post-drome. Everyone might not experience all four stages. Migraine can often start in your adolescence stage and could be severe during your 30s, which mellows down with the next upcoming decades.

Prodrome is the symptoms that you start feeling one or two days before the start of migraines like constipation, mood swings, food cravings, neck stiffness, increased thirst, and frequent yawning.

Aura occurs during the migraine, and are usually visual symptoms like seeing various shapes, bright spots and flashes of light or vision loss. You also feel like needless sensation in your arms and legs and difficulty in speaking.

The attack is the last stage of migraine and may last up to 72 hours if untreated. During this stage, the person may feel throbbing pain on one side of his head with sensitivity to light and sound and feeling of nausea.

 

Post drome is after the effect of migraine, where you might feel drained and confused for about a day.

Causes

Migraine is often said to be genetic with certain environmental factors triggering it. It is caused due to changes in the brainstem and how it interacts with the trigeminal nerve which results in a major pain pathway and causes chemical imbalance (serotonin) which otherwise helps regulate pain in your nervous system.

Major triggers of migraine are hormonal changes in women, alcoholic drinks like wine, stress, sensory stimuli, sleeping disorder, physical exertion, weather changes and medications like contraceptives and vasodilators. Sometime food allergies and food additives like aspartame could also cause migraines.

Often people with a family history of migraines are said to have chances of developing a migraine and it starts during adolescence stage and cools down after you have passed your 30s. Women are more likely to get a migraine, and this might trigger during the onset of the mensuration cycle.

Diagnosis

You will need to visit a neurologist to get help to diagnose and treat migraine which will be done based on your medical history. Some tests like MRI and CT scans might be conducted. MRI will help diagnose any occurrence of tumors, strokes, bleeding, or infection in your brain. And CT scan will take a cross-sectional image of your brain to diagnose tumors, infections or any kind of damage in your brain.

Before visiting a doctor, you must keep a logbook of your symptoms and pain like what likely triggers your migraine, what are possible causes of it, any major changes in your life in recent times, list of all the medications that you take. The doctor will try to diagnose you with questions like how often you feel the headache and how severe it is, if anything seems to improve your symptoms or worsen them and if anybody in your family has a migraine.

Treatments

Migraines are treated to stop the symptoms to occur and prevent any future attack. Your medication might include pain killers and preventive medication that will help you reduce the frequency and severity of your migraine. Pain killers will have to be taken while you are having an attack and preventive medication might be asked to be taken every day as a preventive measure.

Other than this you might also like to make some lifestyle changes to keep migraines away. You can try certain relaxation techniques to help you deal with stress and reduce pain. Develop a healthy sleeping and eating routine, drink plenty of fluids and keep yourself hydrated. You can also keep a log of your headache to understand it better and then discuss it with your doctor to figure out what exactly causes it. Regular exercise always seems to help prevent migraines by reducing tension.

Migraine is a condition which you cannot control or stop completely from having. But with certain medications and lifestyle changes you can always make it better for you to deal with it. When you see migraine-like conditions, then you must first visit your doctor to get it diagnosed because certain other brain conditions like a tumor and internal bleeding in the brain are also having similar symptoms. After diagnosis only, one must take the medication. It’s a disease that becomes better with time.

You might not even have it after a certain age, but dealing with it requires a lot of support and help from your friends and family. It’s not easy to deal with that kind of pain, especially at a young age. It keeps you tarred for around 5 days. Taking regular medication is something that will help you get over it and improve your condition over time.

Medicolo is a lifestyle website that helps you understand how others are dealing with similar medical conditions. People often share their stories and personal experiences on this website of a certain medical condition. The website is aimed to help you with a warm and supportive environment and help you with those initial questions and issues or biases you might be having and clear them out for you. Also, the website brings you the latest news in that arena of disease to help you understand and know about the latest treatments that are available for your disease. You can also share your journey so far of how you dealt with migraine of their website.