How to Identify Migraine Headaches

Video Transcript

"Hello. My name is Dr. Susan Jewell and behalf of Expert Village, today I am going to talk to you about how to recognize and treat headaches. Now in this particular clip, we're going to talk about migraines, migraine headaches. Migraine headaches affect 45 million cases per year and it usually affects the women population. Now migraine headaches, it's origin is from the vascular family, which means that most migraines has some kind of biological, physiological affect that causes it. Now usually what happens is that when the blood vessels that actually serve the brain area, the skull area region it serves, there's all these vessels that go into this region of the head, so this is the skull and head and these are the vessels. What happens when you get a migraine is that something, whatever the stimulus or the factor that triggers a migraine, it causes the vessels to, say this is a vessel, when it dilates, when it dilates out then you're going to get a wider diameter and so you're going to get more increased blood flow, so when there's more increased blood flow to these, through these vessels that distributes around the skull then that causes the person to get headaches and in particular, migraine headaches. So that's, research has shown that migraine headaches has a vascular origin in its course. Now most of these patients they come in and they complain of a one-sided very intense throbbing on the side of the head. And it could be in the front, the frontal lobe area, it could be in the temple area, the side of the head, or the top of the head but it's always on one side of the head, it's never bilateral on both sides. And then they also come in saying that they usually have an era or what we would say, define, as early warning signs that this could possibly be an impending migraine symptom that's coming on. So some of the symptoms that they complain of that associate the headache, the pain with migraine, is the vomiting, the dizziness, the nausea and tremors that could come, accompany the pain of the migraines. So this, these are some of the symptoms and signs often that you find with people coming in complaining of migraine headaches."