LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

headache

Analgesic use: Predictor of chronic pain, medication overuse headache – (07-21-03)

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Analgesic use: Predictor of chronic pain, medication overuse headache

The results of this study find that in patients with heavy analgesic use, they were more likely to experience chronic pain 11 years later. This is not really a big surprise since it is well known that NSAIDs inhibit proper healing of connective tissue. Consider a patient on long term NSAIDs that sustains an injury. The injury never properly heals because of the block to normal healing. We know have a tissue that is prone to injury, setting up the cycle for further injury and NSAID use.

Neurology — Abstracts: Zwart et al. 61 (2): 160

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Electroacupuncture for Tension-type Headache – (04-22-04)

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Electroacupuncture for Tension-type Headache on Distal Acupoints Only

Let the sticklers in acadamia figure this one out. Acupuncture is definitely gaining ground on the research front.

Electroacupuncture for Tension-type Headache on Distal Acupoints Only: A Randomized, Controlled, Crossover Trial – Headache, ..

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MEDICATION AVAILABLE FOR CHRONIC DAILY HEADACHES – (05-09-02)

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Tizanidine Helpful in Chronic Daily Headache

I’m sorry, but articles looking for new medications for headaches always irritates me. First of all, most patients have multiple types of headaches (and while “migraine” seems to be the wastebasket diagnosis most are given, I find most are not migraine at all…) so they will need multiple therapeutic angles. I can say with a high degree of confidence that almost every headache patient can achieve full relief within a few weeks if they are willing to following recommendations. We don’t need more drugs for a problem we already have a good answer to.

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HEADACHE IN YOUNG DUE TO PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONS – (01-10-02)

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Physical and psychological correlates of headache in young adults

Sometimes I am amazed at just how prevalent headaches are in today’s society, both in research studies and in my own practice. Not that it’s any great surprise, but this study finds that neck and back injuries before age 12 were linked to tension HA in young adults. I would like to change this to improperly treated neck and back injuries. HA originated from the neck muscles is an incredibly common cause of HA, and yet I cannot tell you how many patients come into my office that have had HA for literally decades, and NO ONE HAS EVER TOUCHED THEIR NECK!! It just makes me want to throttle someone that a significanct portion of this patient’s HA could have been eliminated decades earlier if someone had just addressed the cervical spine and musculature.

JNNP — Abstracts: Waldie and Poulton 72 (1): 86.

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Can Sleep Apnea Cause Headaches? Sleep Lab for Chronic Headaches

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Might the horrendous “gasping for air” sound sleep apnea sufferers make cause headaches? If this description fits your night, maybe it’s time to visit a sleep lab.

The brain is a very sensitive organ.  Bombard it with toxic chemicals from the environment, deprive it of fuel or stress it out and it’s not going to be happy with you.

The same goes for oxygen.  Decrease oxygen supply to the brain cells, even by the smallest amount, and you can trigger a headache. 

“But how?” you ask.

When it comes to keeping our brain cells happy and healthy one of the factors that plays a critical role is the ability to carry oxygen to our brains. If the brain doesn’t have enough oxygen, our mitochondria won’t be able to produce the energy (in the form of ATP) that we need, and the brain is not able to function the way it is supposed to.

So, any drop in the ability to deliver oxygen to the brain can create problems. This is exactly the state that many women experience in the second half of their menstrual cycles as the lining of the endometrium begins to build, removing red blood cells from circulation and reducing the ability of the blood to bring oxygen to the brain.

This can be a very subtle drop in red blood cell level, but given how sensitive the brain is to changes in oxygen levels, that can be enough to trigger a menstrual migraine in women who are already sensitive.

While we’re on the subject of reducing oxygen delivery to the brain, what about sleep apnea?

Ask anyone who’s slept next to someone with sleep apnea and they will tell you that it can be a scary experience.  The person can stop breathing many times per hour, leaving the other person in the bed unable to sleep, constantly ready to dial 911 if the breathing doesn’t resume this time…

This is a monumentally bad situation for our health.  And this is on top of the fact that most cases of central sleep apnea are caused by being prediabetic, which carries its own risk to our health.

Clearly this sleep apnea will both stress the body out as well as deprive the brain of oxygen.  As mentioned, this drop in oxygen is not received nicely by the neurons, as we can see from this particular study.

Researchers looked at a group of chronic head sufferers (chronic migraine without aura, episodic migraine without aura, migraine with aura, tension-type headache, chronic post-traumatic headache, medication overuse headache) and identified how many of these experienced sleep apnea.  Here are the findings:

  1. All patients were receiving standard treatment for their headaches by their neurologist.
  2. 63% of the chronic headache sufferers had obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).
  3. Of the patients with OSA, 63% used CPAP and 82% of these used the CPAP as prescribed.
  4. 49% of this group of patients had a positive response to therapy (meds or CPAP)
  5. Patients with OSA who using the CPAP were more likely to have improvement in headaches
  6. Of the 33 patients who used CPAP, 13 reported improvement in headaches specifically due to CPAP therapy.

Overall, this is some pretty strong stuff and would suggest that every chronic headache sufferer should be evaluated at a sleep lab for sleep apnea.  This is, of course, in addition to lifestyle changes designed to improve brain health.

If you use a CPAP and have suffered with chronic headaches, did using the CPAP help your headaches?

 

GET RID OF MIGRAINE HEADACHES THROUGH DRUGS – (12-22-03)

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Single-Site Botulinum Toxin Injection for Elimination of Migraine Trigger Points

This issue has come up quite frequently with the increased use of plastic surgery and botulism injections. Essentially, treatment of one facial muscle above the eye, whether paralyzing with injection or cutting with plastic surgery, shows drastic reductions or elimination of migraine headaches.

Regular readers of Updates know that I feel a great number of tension headaches are misdiagnosed as migraines. In my years of practice I’ve seen many headache patients and usually get excellent results. I feel that true migraines are more electrical in nature (a classification of seizures, actually). However, the impact of an intervention on a muscle would suggest one of two things.

First, our idea of what a migraine truly is is wrong; or (more likely), many of these migraines are misdiagnosed in the first place and are really tension headaches. Either way, I will now be sure to include treatment to the ocular muscles in any headache patients from now on.

Single-Site Botulinum Toxin Type A Injection for Elimination of Migraine Trigger Points – Headache, Vol 43, Issue 10, pp. 108..

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Chronic Migraine Treatment: Have You Tried These 7 Steps?

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Migraine headache sufferers are told we don’t know what causes migraines, so all we can do is control them. Thus, chronic migraine treatment today = medication.

I would contend that this is just not true.

But to understand the basics of migraine headaches, you first need to understand my favorite part of the cell, the mitochondria…

The little “powerhouse of the cell.”  That little organelle within the cell that helps to generate energy for a cell.  And the “energy currency” for every cell is adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.  There are some billion or so reactions that occur in our body EVERY SECOND, and each one of these requires a molecule of ATP to get the job done.

Some tissues, like fat, use very little energy.  Others, like the heart, our muscles and our brain, use much more.  At rest, the nervous system, which includes our brain, is the greatest utilizer of ATP in the body.  Once we start moving, the muscles take over and have the greatest need.

Imagine that.  As you sit here reading this, your brain is requiring mass amounts of energy just to process the information.

So what does this mean?  It means that each cell of the nervous system requires thousands of mitochondria just to generate the energy needed for a brain cell just to perform it’s basic functions.  And each of these mitochondria are little factories churning out ATP for the brain cell to use at an enormous rate.

As the mitochondria in your brain cells work, they produce a nasty little byproduct called free radicals. Too many free radicals and the brain cell gets damaged.  It turns out that these free radicals may destroy transporters that pick up the a chemical called glutamate from outside of the cell.

If glutamate does not get cleaned up the way it is supposed to, it will keep sending its message again and again and again—constantly sending the neuron into overdrive.  Kind of like a skipping record (sorry Generation Xers–you’ll have to Google “record…”) that irritates your brain.

Because of all of the above and more, evidence has been present for several decades now that the protection and nutritional support of the mitochondria needs to be an integral part of avoiding, reducing the severity of and reducing the long term ramifications of migraines and seizures.

This particular article reinforces this concept, stating that glutamate activation and mitochondrial problems are critical in the causes of migraines.

So what can you do to improve your migraines?

  1. Calorie restriction without nutrient restriction is probably the most powerful method to improve brain cell function
  2. If cutting calories won’t work for you, try alternate day calorie restriction
  3. Magnesium can help to improve the way your brain cells are working
  4. Bhadori leanness principle uses exercise and calorie restriction
  5. The supplement carnitine may help improve mitochondrial function
  6. The amino acids cystine and glycine may help

MAGNESIUM AND TENSION TYPE HEADACHE – (10-31-05)

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Magnesium and Tension Type Headache

While this was a very small study, the results were pretty amazing. 76% of this small group experienced symptom reduction with magnesium alone. Of interesting note is the form and dose of magnesium used–2.25 g of magnesium pidolate.

I was unfamiliar with this form until I saw it in this article, and some research does suggest that it might be better utilized by the body. What I cannot explain is how such an incredibly high dose (most people taking more than 500 mg will experience loose stools, and this was done in kids with 4.5 times that dose) was tolerated in these kids. Is it that this form of magnesium is absorbed better? Stay tuned..

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