What are the main causes of headaches?

  It is often said that a headache is not a big problem, but a pain that can kill you. Headaches have been a persistent problem for many people, and some people have even committed suicide by having a nervous breakdown because of severe headaches. As pain doctors, we believe that pain is an abnormal signal from the nerves, and we do our best to find out the cause of every headache for our patients and relieve their pain.  The nerves in the head come mainly from the trigeminal nerve in the skull, the cervical spinal nerve outside the skull, and the vegetative nerves in the meningeal vessels. Common benign factors that stimulate these nerves are abnormal vasodilator s substances, cranial pressure changes, cerebrovascular compression, cervical spondylosis, inflammation of the skull base or nasopharynx, etc. In the pain department, physicians have found that more than 50% of headache patients are caused by nerve irritation from cervical muscle spasm or bony hyperplasia or disc herniation. When we carefully target cervical spine problems such as loosening myofascial adhesions, adjusting cervical curvature, closing disc fissures or adjusting cervical sympathetic nerve function, we can often miraculously cure some intractable headaches.  In September this year, a patient from Shunde who had headache for more than ten years had an explosive pulsation at the top of the forehead during each attack. The local hospital had been treating him with cluster headache, using anti-inflammatory analgesics and glucocorticoids for short-term analgesic effect, but this caused femoral head necrosis and he received bilateral femoral head replacement. After examination, it was found that the patient’s posterior cervical muscles had become stiff and the infrared thermography showed abnormally high temperature in the posterior cervical region. The patient was given a cervical sympathetic ganglion block to improve blood circulation in the head and neck and electroacupuncture release of the posterior cervical muscle adhesion points. We recommended that he undergo cervical discography to determine whether there was a responsible disc causing the headache. However, the patient asked to be discharged because he was physically and mentally exhausted due to his busy work schedule and because he was physically and mentally exhausted from more than ten years of headaches, and he couldn’t help but tremble all over at the thought of triggering headaches again. However, a week after his discharge he was admitted to the pain unit again for another headache attack, and I performed cervical disc puncture angiograms of the cervical 5/6, cervical 4/5, and cervical 6/7 segments in the DSA room and replicated the usual severe headache, while the subsequent CT scan showed the disc fracture pattern. A few days later, the patient came back to the DSA room for a cervical disc puncture with radiofrequency thermocoagulation, and the pain was relieved immediately after the procedure. He was overwhelmed and said, “I have been treated for my headache for more than 10 years, and today I am finally getting eradicated!  Anatomically, the upper three spinal nerves of the cervical spine innervate the posterior head sensation, and there is a trigeminal spinal nucleus at the level of cervical 2 in the spinal canal extending to the pontine brain mapping the frontal facial nociception, and a series of sympathetic ganglia arranged in front of the neck manage the vascular function of the head, face, arms and chest, so cervicogenic headache is very easy to occur. Vigilance and attention to screening and treatment of cervical spondylosis when we encounter headache patients will likely give them a hope for a cure.