Some ideas about TTH

The tension-type headache is pain or discomfort in the head that is usually associated with the tension of the muscles in the area.

Causes

First, you can take into account local level causes the cervical musculature, such as bad positions or trauma, a facial level as a poor correction of visual acuity with constant effort fixing. This creates an inability to relax the cervical and pericranial muscles, which in many patients is the basis for the onset of pain.

However, the TTH can also be due to the Anxiety or depression, associated more often with this type of headache that to any other type. Almost always the psychic aspect influences or ends influencing the genesis and pain tolerance.

The persistence of psychogenic factors ( unresolved internal conflicts, chronic anxiety, depressive states etc ) are contributing to the chronicity of the process. These causes impossible pericranial and cervical muscle relaxation, which worsens the mood and anxiety generates more difficult even more muscular relaxation.

The symptomatic medication abuse (ie, analgesics ) may also be a contributing factor to the chronicity of the problem, as occurs with migraine.

Identify tension headache

The spreads are always clinical criteria (ie, symptoms that the patient reports and can not be objectified so obvious).

The International Headache Society (IHS ) describes tension headache as suffer more than 10 times in life headaches hard 30 minutes and 7 days without nausea or vomiting (may have anorexia ) without photophobia, and phonophobia ( joint, although they may exist separately) and has at least two of the following characteristics:

1. Bilateral Location

2. Quality oppressive (non-pulsatile )

3. Mild or moderate intensity

4. It is not aggravated by physical activity and leads to avoid unconsciously

Any other type of pain is not serious tension. It should be remarked that tension headache“& rdquo ;, pure is, in a patient who does not have other types of headaches, such as migraine, is rare. Since in many cases the patient has multiple types of headache is relatively difficult to differentiate.

Treatment

There are no exclusive treatments to this problem. For the pain control can be used painkillers Type nonsteroidal antiinflammatory. Frequent consumption of analgesics could be passed tension headache episodic to chronic form as already pointed out, so if the patient is forced to take this kind of soothing 8 or more days per month daily treatment would be indicated, called“prophylactic”.

The drug most used for this situation is the Amitriptyline a low dose, which has proven its effectiveness in clinical trials against placebo.

To improve pain control may try to control stress, either with psychotherapeutic techniques, such as yoga or relaxation techniques or pharmacological techniques such as the use of muscle relaxants.