New information on cluster headaches

Cluster headache is one of the most painful conditions that has lead some patients call it a suicide headache. A new observational study done by researchers at the Eli Lilly company and Stanford University was presented at the recent annual scientific meeting of the American Headache Society.

Considering that cluster headaches are relatively rare, the major strength of this study is its size – 7589 patients. These patients were compared to over 30,000 control subjects without headaches. We’ve always known that cluster headaches are more common in men with previous studies indicating that male to female ratio is between 5:1 and 3:1. However, only 57% of patients in this new report were males. This does not reflect my experience – I see at least five times as many men as women. It is possible that I underdiagnose cluster headaches in women or the study used unreliable data. In fact, the study data was collected from insurance claims, so I suspect that the truth is closer to my experience and to the older published data.

The study did find that thoughts of suicide were 2.5 times more common in patients with cluster headaches compared to controls, while depression, anxiety and sleep disorders were twice as common. Cluster headache patients also were 3 times more likely to have drug dependence. The most commonly prescribed drugs were opiates (narcotics) in 41%, which partially explains high drug dependence rates, steroids, such as prednisone (34%), triptans, such as sumatriptan (32%), antidepressants (31%), NSAIDs (29%), epilepsy drugs (28%), blood pressure drugs, such as verapamil (27%), and benzodiazepines, such as Valium or Xanax (22%).

It is very unfortunate that over a period of one year only 30% of patients were prescribed drugs recommended for cluster headaches. We know that narcotics and benzodiazepine tranquilizers are not very effective and can lead to dependence and addiction. Drugs that are effective include a short course of steroids (prednisone), sumatriptan injections, blood pressure drug verapamil (often at a high dose), some epilepsy drugs and occasionally certain antidepressants. The report did not mention oxygen, which can stop individual attacks in up to 60% of cluster headache sufferers. Nerve blocks and to a lesser extent, Botox injections can also provide lasting relief. It is possible that the data on oxygen, nerve blocks and Botox was not available.