The Attack Of Migraine Headaches
If you suffer from chronic migraine headaches, it’s
almost impossible to explain to a headache-free person exactly what this
devastating condition feels like. Like hearing thunder in the distance
and knowing a storm is approaching, you feel the pre-morbid signs of the
impending onslaught.
Your vision may change; you may see spots or brief flashes of light
called “auras,” you might feel nauseous, and you may become sensitive to
light and noise. Although you feel no head pain yet, you know what’s
coming; the migraine headache that grinds forward like a crushing force
until you’re incapacitated by intense head pain, severe nausea, and your
need to be in a dark, silent room.
You feel helpless to stop the migraine’s onslaught, but you know it’s
useless. It will come, no matter what you do, and it will stay with you
for up to three misery-filled days until it finally relents and your
body succeeds in fighting it off. In the meantime, you can’t eat or
sleep, you dare not even move lest it cause increased pain. You can’t go
to work, you can’t do household chores or care for your children. You’d
like to weep, but that would just make the pain worse so you remain as
silent as you can. No lights, no noise, nothing.
Then you slowly emerge from the migraine headache feeling as if you’ve
been beaten to a bloody pulp. You eventually regain normal functioning,
but there is always the fear of “next time,” because you know there will
be a next time, especially if you are female, pre-menstrual or
menopausal, and have a family history of migraine headaches.
Migraines are often so misunderstood and under-diagnosed, that many view
them as female bids for attention or pity or even a symptom of mental
illness such as chronic depression. You give up trying to describe just
what a migraine headache feels like because unless you’ve walked that
walk, you can’t possibly empathize with the suffering they cause.
What’s the Difference between then and now?
A lot! We now know what causes migraine headaches: heredity, certain
foods like red wine and aged cheese, PMS, menopause, too little sleep,
to name a few. The actual mechanism of the migraine headache is the
constriction and then relaxing/engorging of blood vessels in a part of
the brain, usually over one eye.
Once the
cause of migraine headache was
known, the treatment of this condition made great strides. To medical
researchers, the answer was simple; to eliminate the pain of engorged
blood vessels, we need a medication that’s called a “vaso-constrictor,”
which constricts, or tightens, these blood vessels that are the culprit
in causing the migraine headache. The first of the vaso-constrictors was
obvious and unassuming: caffeine!
A natural vaso-constrictor of the highest order, right there on grocery
store shelves in the form of coffee, tea, chocolate, and pure caffeine
tablets like No-Doze and Vivarin. It was as simple as that; take a
pain-killing drug like aspirin, combine it with acetaminophen (Tylenol),
throw in a little caffeine, and Voila! Along came Excedrin!
Migraine headache sufferers rejoiced. Well, some of them did, anyway.
But for many more who did not tolerate caffeine’s side effects of
feeling jittery, this wasn’t a solution and they continued to live in
pain. Finally, a decade ago, a safe, effective and easy solution to just
about everybody’s migraine came to pass. This was sumatriptan, brand
name Imitrex. This was the first of the “triptan” drugs that provided
complete relief from migraines within about an hour’s time.
In the 90s, Imitrex was only available as an injection; migraine
headache sufferers learned to use an auto-injector that they carried
with them at all times to stop the headache before it got going
full-force. Some sufferers balked at self-injection, and the first five
minutes of an Imitrex injection caused some very strange, tingly bodily
sensations. But the triptan drug worked.
Modern medicine moved on, and gave the world Imitrex in pill form to
many sufferers’ relief. This drug paved the way for other triptan drugs;
the “big three” being Imitrex, rizatriptan (Maxalt) and elatriptan (Relpax).
They’re all triptan drugs, made by different drug companies, but their
mechanism to
migraine headache relief is the
same vaso-constriction that proved effective for some with caffeine.
They work quickly, at the first sign of a migraine such as an “aura.”
Gone is the nausea, the sensitivity to light and sound, the throbbing,
relentless pain. If you feel a migraine coming on, you can begin to feel
relief within about thirty minutes; with an additional dose, your pain
can be relieved completely. No missed work, no missed family time – you
have your life back!
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