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Medical Video: Migraines in children: Guidelines for primary care management of headache
You may be familiar with the pain in the head that appears only on one side. No wonder if you then call it a migraine, because in Indonesia, migraines are identical to the next headache. In fact, what you are feeling is probably a cluster headache or cluster headache, which is focused on just one part of the head.
Then, what is migraine actually?
The difference between migraines and the headache
The next headache, aka cluster headache, is a type of headache characterized by pain that suddenly appears behind the eyes or the area around the eyes, but only on one side of the head. Pain can last at least 15 minutes to three hours.
Whereas migraines are attacks of recurrent headaches followed by pain that is usually severe and often makes it helpless. The pain is throbbing intensely or in the form of extreme pain like being hit by a hard object. Migraines often occur on one side of the head. However, this condition is classified as a neurological disorder due to lower resistance to migraine-causing stimuli, different from normal headaches or cluster headaches.
Characteristics of migraine attacks
Some people experience nausea, vomiting, or sensitivity to noise or light during a migraine attack. Severe migraine attacks can last from four hours to three days.
Migraines can occur with or without aura. Aura is a perception disorder experienced by sufferers, such as smelling strange smells, seeing bright light, lines or "stars", or sounds that actually don't exist. Sufferers may experience difficulty speaking or other basic abilities (such as writing or reading). Temporary vision loss on one side of the eye is also common.
The aura can begin to appear 10 minutes to one day before a migraine attack occurs. In some cases, the sufferer may only experience the aura without being followed by a migraine attack. Beraura migraine tends to be lighter and does not make sufferers suffer, compared to sudden migraine attacks without aura.
Migraine will be said to be severe if nausea, headache, and other symptoms are so severe that it prevents patients from doing normal activities. Migraines are also said to be severe if the patient has a history of attacks of at least 2-5 attacks with the same pattern.
What causes a person to get a migraine attack?
For years, doctors and scientists believed that migraines were associated with swelling and narrowing of blood vessels in the surface of the brain.
Now researchers have been able to determine that swollen blood vessels are one of the many chains of causes of migraine attacks, but this is not the main cause. What they know for sure, migraines are hereditary neurological disorders.
Reporting from How Stuff WorksIf one of your parents has a history of migraine attacks, you have a 50 percent chance of having the same condition. If your parents have this history, your chances increase by 70 percent.
The researchers believe that migraines are caused by abnormal biochemical activity of the largest cranial nerves in the body as well as generators of pain signals, the trigeminal nerve. Molecular changes in the trigeminal nerve quickly spread to the surrounding neural networks.
What happens in our head during a migraine attack?
Reporting from Health, the mechanism of pain generally starts from stimuli received by the trigeminal nerve, thus causing the release of a number of neurotransmitters, including serotonin which is associated with mood changes and dopamine. The release of these neurotransmitters then causes pain, followed by blood pressure that goes up and down naturally following the heartbeat. In addition, stimulation of the trigeminal nerve also causes the surrounding blood vessel tissue to swell and interfere with blood flow back to the brain.
In migraine sufferers, this mechanism becomes very sensitive to pressure. These nerves continuously send pain signals even though there is no real pain stimulation, for example the head is hit by a wall. However, sufferers have a threshold for lower brain biochemical abnormalities. In other words, this nerve becomes super sensitive as a result of exposure to a trigger or a combination of several triggers at one time.
If a migraine is not treated immediately, the pain around the eye area and temples will spread to the central nervous system. At this point, this pain will be very difficult to turn off. Just like a car alarm that keeps burning: instead of being a proper protection system, this abnormally functioning system actually disrupts your ability to function normally in everyday life.
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