How to Identify Tension & Chronic Headaches

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell, and on behalf of Expert Village today I'm going to talk you about how to recognize and treat pain from headaches. Now in this clip we're gonna talk specifically about tension headaches and chronic headaches. Now if you look at this board I've broken down some of the information about these particular types of headaches. Now tension headaches causes ninety percent of the cases. Now according to the headache foundation forty-five million cases are diagnosed as tension headaches, and this particular type of headache is usually caused by stress, anxiety, and the pressure of daily life, and the lifestyle that one leads especially in the western culture. And most of the patients describe that the symptoms of this particular tension pain headache as like a band that's wrapped tightly around the head, and it affects both sides of the head. And we will say it's a generalized pain associated with a dull ache and I can say a tightness or tension around the head. So if I was to draw a diagram, for example if this was the skull, the head of the person then the pain would usually affect both sides of the head. Usually would have other associated symptoms with it, maybe blurriness and stuffiness of the nose and so on and so forth. So tension headaches is a major cause of headache tension. A chronic headache is basically defined as people have very reoccurring signs and symptoms of particular headaches. And this also has sort of a genetic and biological component to it. These people really suffer from very increasing attacks of headaches as opposed to tension which can come once a month or if they changed their lifestyle or reduced some of the stress that would actually go into remission, but people with chronic headaches usually do not go into remission, and if they do it comes back again for long periods of time. So this is one of the major causes of headaches in our population. Tension and chronic headaches."