Over 15% of world population has a headache on any given day | Hacker News Reader

Over 15% of world population has a headache on any given day

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Back in August of 2021 I started tracking my headaches. I was experiencing 10+ debilitating migraines a month and had modified a number of variables in effort to reduce them (sleep, stress, water/caffeine intake, etc).

In September I got a blood panel from my GP and noticed low levels of essential vitamins. In October, I had 12 migraines. I started supplements for B12, Vitamin D, Vitamin K, etc. The migraines decreased each month: in November to 9, then 3, then 1. In February I had my first migraine free month in years.

Neurology is complicated. Migraines/headaches can be caused by a variety of factors. I chose to rule out things in my control (diet, exercise, stress, sleep, and finally vitamins) before taking daily use migraine medicine.

Well said. We do so much damage to our own bodies and environments. This compound each other in unknown ways. But it is hard and takes specific effort to correct.

Same here. D and B12 were drastically low. Though mine were not migraines really, but close. Occipital nerve pain. Supplements (B12, D) and neck exercises, and heat fomenting have been of tremendous help. Touchwood!

I get really bad migraines when I fast sometimes, a random youtube video I came across suggested it might be from a mineral deficiency and suggested taking some Himalayan salt and to my surprise it works really well for me, knocks out my migraine within an hour every time.

Good to see your comment. I have been having this issue and worth trying your solution.

I've experienced the vitamin thing too, even when taking a multivitamin. Turns out that I don't absorb vitamins in a pill very well, switching to chewables and chewing the hell out of them has eliminated a ton of weird physical/mental things for me.

Have you considered capsules instead? Chewables typically have very few active ingredients, rather being almost all gelatin and sugar.

No, can you recommend some?

Two-Per-Day Capsules from Life Extension, either directly from their site or resold via Amazon. It's everything you should need, in a capsule form which should have no problem coming apart in your stomach. It's around $15 a month.

If you want the ultimate, look at Life Extension Mix, which is 9 big tablets or 14 capsules per day because there's so much stuff in it, but this is overkill for most people (and at something like $50 a month it is not cheap).

You can crush the tablets with a mortar and pestle, which you can buy online. A mortar and pestle is very cheap and is basic lab equipment. Alternatively you can use a pill crusher which is available in pharmacies.

You can buy empty capsules (gelatin/vegan/flavored/etc.) online or at a local vitamin/supplement store. They are in standardized sizes like 0 or 00 or something similar.

You can fill the capsules with the crushed tablet material using something called a “pill machine” (search for it online). The pill machine that you buy needs to match the size of your capsules. So if you buy 0 sized capsules, you need to buy a capsule machine that uses size 0 capsules.

Multivitamins are often sort of a scam: they contain cheap versions of vitamins that are not directly bioavailable, and essential minerals that are in a non-water-soluble form. All this leads to poor bioavailability.

In addition, some vitamin forms are actively harmful, such as the very common vitamin B12 form, cyanocobalamin, which releases cyanide as it becomes bioavailable. Better B12 forms such as methylcobalamin can be demethylated enzymatically and the free cobalamin is then able to bind to free cyanide (or other toxins) and remove them from the body.

What about the month of March? Symptom-free too?

Not to take away from your great efforts to solve this problem but you controlled for a few key variables in your experiment but not for the placebo effect which is one of the most important factors to rule out in such experiments.

Why would you want to rule out the placebo effect? If the placebo effect eliminates your pain, that's fantastic!

What I meant is that you can't say with absolute confidence that supplementing for vitamins cured his migraine without accounting for the placebo effect in that experiment.

It's not a valid experiment regardless. There are too many confounding factors and too small a group.

It doesn't matter. Medicine is a lot less about proper science than we'd like to believe. It's about helping people feel better. Science is a crucial tool for that, but it doesn't always work, while random guessing sometimes does. Even the science is often supplemented with random guessing.

Eventually, you take enough random-guesses-that-worked and apply science to it. That gives you a lot more confidence to recommend it to other people. But often, confidence is all you get, rarely certainty.

Yeah, you're definitely right; I should have added in the end "among many other factors".

While I admit that n is pretty small indeed and thus doesn't qualify for a proper and rigorous clinical experiment, the reason I mentioned the placebo effect in particular is because of the fact that some symptoms or diseases have some psychosomatic streak to them, if you will, and therefore the role of the placebo effect in these cases becomes more pronounced to research and investigate but if the OP felt way better after the treatment, that's what it all counts like you said.

It was no nitpicking or mischief on my part raising this issue :)

Good question. Indeed, I prioritized improving my vitamin levels for health reasons, including the possibility that it may reduce my headaches, rather than running a purely scientific experiment. If the migraines come back while I maintain normal vitamin levels, I'll continue my experimentation!

March: 0

April: 0

When I was very young, I suffered from chronic headaches. I used to just sit in class with my head on the desk feeling completely miserable. Doctors suggested this was likely due to sinus problems. My nose was completely stuffed up all the time. After going to a few specialists, nothing ever really came of it, but I did eventually just grow out of it.

However, I continued to get these really nasty migraines from time to time throughout most of my life. It would typically happen maybe once a month at most, but it was almost always on a Sunday. I would wake up and my head would not hurt, but I immediately knew it was coming because things just didn't feel quite right. As the day goes on, I would start to feel nauseous and my head would slowly get worse. By evening I could barely move, and basically just had to lay in a completely dark and silent room, hoping I would eventually fall asleep. Typically waking up the next day with still some after-effect of it. I found a few things that helped a little, such as going outside and getting fresh air, but nothing that would cure it.

As I've gotten older, that pretty much never happens anymore - maybe once every year at most. I can't think of anything that actually changed, it just stopped being a problem.

Have you changed your diet? A friend of mine struggled with chronic headaches and swears that cutting out most refined sugars from her diet cured them.

At some point in my life I stopped drinking soda regularly, so maybe there is some factor there. I could never identify why on one particular day, I would get a migraine vs any other day. The only constant factor was that it always seemed to happen on a weekend. There were some days where I would feel it coming on, and tried getting up and out doing something as much as I could. This tended to help a bit, but typically by evening I would still have some form of migraine.

If it only happened on Sundays, I'd suspect it was either from something you did on Saturdays, or something you didn't do on the weekends.

Translating: drinking alcohol or not drinking caffeine

Now that you say it, I used to get weekend headaches because I drank coffee at work, but not outside it.

Took a few months before I saw the pattern.

jaw tension? muscle tension at base of skull?

I have similar ones. 4 standard dose ibuprofens (a big dose, but still safe if you eat something with them) generally works, sometimes for BAD ones I do 5-6 ibuprofens and sometimes also 2 tylenols.

Sometimes taking 2 ibuprofen early on (as you say, you don't have a headache but know its coming) ward mine off so the heavier doses aren't needed.

> It would typically happen maybe once a month at most, but it was almost always on a Sunday.

Do you recall if you slept in on those days? I tend to get a specific kind of headache if I sleep for too long.

This also happens if I take a nap during the day. I don't really take any naps because of that, but I remember hating being forced to nap in Kindergarten (at least during the first two years or so), probably for the same reason.

Idem for me. Too much sleep or late wake up during the week end tends to cause me migraine.

aside from hangovers, I don't remember the last time I've gotten a headache since starting to drink more water. this year i pretty much stopped drinking and that rules out hangovers now too. I think a lot of people could benefit immensely from drinking a lot more water. for reference I drink 2-3L a day minimum and don't consume caffeine, but have excellent sleep and energy throughout the entire day

Of course it's not a cure all as there are other causes, but adequate hydration and electrolyte balance can help a lot! My experience is the same, if I have a headache it is almost always dehydration or lack of electrolytes.

Lack of sleep can also be pretty brutal.

I remember I used to have headaches on holidays. It was frustrating. I was ok at work but not when I had free time.

Then I realized I drank a lot of water at work but not enough at home.

The relief was pretty quick after drinking. Now I always have a 2l refillable bottle by my desk.

Also leaving caffeine made me more energetic through the day. I don't need that sip of coffee to be able to function and if I'm tired for whatever reason, if I drink a coffe now I really feel the effects and keeps me awake and alert.

It's nice to see others who feel the same. I use a 1L bottle but same deal; whenever I feel a bit off, chugging some water is usually enough to feel normal again. And if I'm consistent with my water, I usually don't feel off to begin with.

Same about caffeine! I think a lot of people are addicted to caffeine and think withdrawal is what normal energy level is like, and caffeine boosts you. For me it's been the complete opposite. Now that I don't drink coffee I always feel energy, without the psychological effect of thinking that I'm tired if I'm not drinking coffee.

Yeah, I think the psychological effect it produces is so strong it influences us without even knowing it's psychological.

We've all heard people say "don't even talk to me until I have my coffee". It's not that you need that coffee 2 minutes after you wake up but you think you need it or you can't do anything without being an ass.

Caffeine is a drug that builds a tolerance very quickly. So if you only have it every once in a while, you are going to get more out of any single dose.

Id caution against the myth of water drinking for all cures

As long as you listen to your body and hydrate when thirsty, a lot of our water requirements are satisfied with our food intake and our body is quite good at regulating water and electrolyte levels.

See https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-nutrition/water-myt...

See e.g. dolphins, whales and other marine mammals that thrive without a single glass of fresh water.

Marine mammals obtain fresh water through their diet. Suggesting they survive without any fresh water is just plain wrong

Humans also obtain (some) fresh water through their diet and metabolism.

To explain the latter: when you combine a carbohydrate with oxygen, you mostly get CO2 and H2O.

(No opinion implied on whether humans should drink more water.)

I was suggesting that diet can be sufficient. That said, I can’t fathom how many shrimp you have to eat to quench your thirst.

The odd thing about this kind of stuff is that it won't help you unless you're chronically dehydrated. But nobody thinks they are chronically dehydrated. So the best or only effective way to give this advice is to tell people to drink more water.

nobody is saying it's a cure for everything but a lot of people are basically constantly semi-dehydrated

Even slightly processed food has way more salt than we need, while caffeine & alcohol (the two most widely used drugs) have diuretic effects. Unless you prepare your food from scratch and keep the drugs to a minimum, you need additional water intake to counteract those things.

I have often woken up in the middle of the night dehydrated and felt horrible-- half a bottle/glass of water later and I'm usually able to sleep through at least one more full REM cycle.

How do we know the latter?

Your “proof” is incredibly lackluster. The only study it references was done on people with stage 3 kidney disease, and even the study states the conclusion might be incorrect.

Alternatively, I found a study that concludes that “consuming less than the 24-h water adequate intake may influence the risk of dysfunctional metabolism and chronic diseases” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6315424/

The study does state that the “adequate intake” is different for everyone, but at the end of the day you need to drink water. Spreading the idea that you don’t need to drink water is foolish.

> As long as you listen to your body and hydrate when thirsty,

Are you aware that some people don't ever feel the need to drink or feel thirsty? I myself used to barely drink water throughout the day and I have relatives who don't even drink a glass of water a day. I also have family who have specifically been told by their doctors to drink more water.

I never said water drinking is a panacea, I said most people would benefit from drinking a lot more.

I can easily go a full day without a sip of water. I have to remind myself to drink. I have forgotten what thirst feels like.

I get what you're saying and I do agree.

I think many of us could do with drinking more water each day, especially if exercising. But drinking water won't solve all of your problems.

I guess I should rephrase and give better references, but my overall point was as long as we are consuming the required intake and at the same time if we don’t we are feeling thirsty, then drink water. The idea I wanted to challenge was that everyone will benefit from drinking x amount of water.

I can't say it's a cure all, but for me, hydration was key to avoiding migraines in my 20s-30s. Not just "drink until satisfied", but 1L by noon or a headache by 3-4pm. Losing weight helped reduce this, but still, hydration is a factor in 90% of my headaches.

Try to hydrate with electrolytes to taste. Magnesium salts, potassium salts and NaCl need a balance with water intake. Some diets need less, others more. Some sources of sea salt have a good balance and you don't need artificial supplements at all. Also a tiny bit of sugar opens up your stomach to hydration (see ORS).

For me, a bit of sea salt electrolyte supplementation allows me to reduce the severity of my dust allergies as my body can clear from exposures better.

I'm surprised they don't mention hangovers. I stopped drinking 4-5 years ago and since then I've noticed how many people have 2-3 drinks without a second thought. It's now clear to me how much of my tiredness and achiness was caused by drinking - not stress or insomnia or whatever other idea I had at the time.

I'm not concerned about what other people do from a moral standpoint, but I know a few people in particular who complain that they can't sleep well and drink half a bottle of wine a night.

Little good can come from pointing it out - in the US discussions of drinking habits usually lead to confident assertions that in 'Europe' such drinking is totally normal and reminders that the Queen Mum (allegedly) credited her health to a glass of gin a day.

Definitely agree. Alcohol was my escape of choice for the pandemic. I took 3 months off last year since it was getting too much, but went back to several drinks a night after that. Decided to stop again (maybe permanently) because I started paying more and more attention to how it affects me. Even just limiting it to the weekend results in my feeling cruddy for Mon-Wed. Both less energy and more anxiety, things I used to enjoy got more dull, headaches were more common.

Alcohol is poison, and I'm accepting the reality that there is no such thing as a "good amount".

Alcohol is considered a carcinogen as well. Not sure how much it is compared to tobacco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer

But 3.5% of cancers is not chump change.

Completely anecdotal. ~3 months ago I started getting way more migraines than I have ever had, 2 a week for a month. Completely debilitating for 5 or 6 hours and I am someone that has generally just pushed through whatever discomfort I am experiencing. Prior to that I would get 1 a year if that.

Finally did some introspection and figured out it was due to stress and fully self induced at that. Obsessing over things that were either really not a problem or not that big of a deal. I self medicated by taking a hit of marijuana in the morning before work for a week to blunt the onset and mentally walking myself through why life was good and I was just stressing myself out. Headaches stopped in a week and have been migraine free for a couple months. Stopped the morning cannabis as soon as the headaches stopped and I have been good. Stress is a killer.

"The global prevalence of headache: an update, with analysis of the influences of methodological factors on prevalence estimates"

https://thejournalofheadacheandpain.biomedcentral.com/articl...

PDF: https://thejournalofheadacheandpain.biomedcentral.com/track/...

I'm one of those human weathervanes and get terrible headaches ahead of rainy weather. I've logged such episodes in a notebook and they seem particularly bad during Atlantic hurricane season. My quack, untested, idea is that climate change is leading to a greater incidence of headache.

Increased atmospheric pressure?

For me...

Significant daily fluctuations of pressure and/or humidity.

It's not the increase (or decrease), but rather the rate of change.

Once the weather stabilizes, headaches tend to go away.

Getting a high rise apartment (or office) should fix that. Or moving to a place that has a higher elevation.

(I don't think an absolute increase in atmospheric pressures has caused anyone a headache ever. Relative changes over a short enough time might do so, though.)

What about climate change would cause headaches? Temperature changes seem an unlikely source, and CO2 concentrations would be changing much higher in the atmosphere, not anywhere close to ground level.

Earlier blooming flowers for an earlier allergy season.

The rate of changes from significant weather events is up (e.g. number of storms and the amount of the change in pressure).

CO2 concentrations are changing quite enough at ground level, though that gets to even a ventilation issue in the house or workplace. Working at home I've put a CO2 meter in the room where I work and I can see the fluctuations in that room over the course of a day with me working in it. Overall the world has gone from about 320 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2021. My reading for "in this room" is currently 687. Normally its in the 530 to 640 range across a day, but if I do any baking (gas stove) it can go up significantly and takes a few days (cold weather - don't have windows open) for it to return back down to pre-baking levels.

CO2 concentrations are rising everywhere. It's just easiest to measure consistently in the high atmosphere because it averages out the local sources/sinks.

About ten years ago I was in the break room of a former workplace. There were eight people in the room including myself. The other seven all younger than age 30 said they got migraine headaches every day. I found that hard to believe and assumed they didn't know the difference between a bad headache and a migraine headache.

Even if they are getting a bad headache everyday that would be super bizarre. How bad was your office environment if almost everyone is getting headaches every day?

I've worked in some offices which had horrendous ventilation and no ability to open the window.

I don't care much for ventilation systems in general ... never really works all that well, and are vastly inferior to just opening a window. Some are noisy, too.

Sick building syndrome?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome

It wasn't a great work environment lots of big fish in little ponds.

I suspect the "every day" part was not accurate and it was just headaches they were getting not migraines. But a migraine meant they were sent home (no pay) a headache wouldn't allow that although I do know they truly believed they were migraines.

I grew up in a city near a large swampy area and always had headaches. I went to college in an area closer to the mountains and my headaches stopped. If I go back home for more than a few days, the headaches come back.

It's a weird thing to experience.

Try camping out in your own garden.

A lot of environmental headaches are allergies or pollution, and a good chunk of those are things in your own house - for example dust mites or fumes from plastics/paint/carpet.

Theres a (pretty sure it's) Billy Connolly (comedian) story about buying a house and the previous owners kept getting sick: something to do with the floor varnish.

Sorry, cant look it up right now- im driving and the heavy rain on the autobahn is making me late. My own fault for drinking until 5 this morning, i guess.

If it's a swamp there might be gases being released: https://www.sciencealert.com/how-this-small-lake-in-africa-o...

But yeah the swamp might not have anything to do with it and it could also be something in the house, or the drinking water, etc.

I feel like this is a good place to put the PSA that modern headache treatments have gotten really good, the CGRP drugs for migraine prevention are miraculous for some people and the triptans for migraine treatment can be a reliable stop-button for a migraine that would otherwise take you out for a day.

Some headaches can easily be mistaken for neck muscle pain from sleeping in an awkward position.

If it feels like a headache... isn't it a headache?

By which I mean, shouldn't that be "some headaches can easily not be realised to be caused by...", or is there gatekeeping needed in what is or isn't a 'headache'?

Arguing about semantics is pointless.

Depends what you mean by “semantics” and “pointless”

Yes because a headache is a symptom.

This reminds me of D.A.R.E. talking about whippets in grade school. The speaker went on about "When you do whippets, you don't *actually* get high, your brain just *thinks* you're high..."

I was told growing up that migraines were different from headaches, although it looks like now migraines are sometimes called "migraine headaches". The distinction mattered because the treatment for migraines (things that caused blood vessel constriction, like caffeine) and for other types of headaches (things that caused blood vessel dilation) were opposites, so if you took the wrong medicine it could make your head hurt more. For a first time migraine sufferer, the difference might not be obvious.

That said, I'm not sure how either could be mistaken for neck muscle pain.

The headache is a symptom of the migraine.

I can have a migraine without headache. I'm still non-functional because of all the fun aura symptoms, but I'm not in pain.

Yes, migraines are weird. I am kind of lucky in that mine are neither frequent nor as bad as those by others. For me it manifests as a headache in a distinct spot 9 out of 10 times and I get very sensitive to sound and light (auras are usually very light or not there at all, no nausea or puking). The good thing is that a) I can just take a mild dose of ibuprofen and b) go into a dark, silent room and sleep it off most of the time, on the other hand when I tried triptanes? that didn't work at all. Also I only have a few every year and not multiple times per month like when I was a kid or teenager.

For me the difference is usually easy. If it's a headache-headache, it's annoying and you can function (even if it hurts). If it's a migraine then I simply can't work or do any fun thing anymore, not even watching something or reading.

Related: your office chair can make a big difference. I changed mine and have a lot less upper body pain now than I used to. Within a few days I noticed the difference - it was night and day.

I have crippling migraines 4-6 times a year and I've had them forever. When it happens, I cannot handle light, cannot handle sound, I have a hard time thinking through the brain fog and I just want to stay in a quiet room with very low light waiting for it to pass which takes anywhere from 12 hours to 36 hours. I've lived in quite a few different countries both rural and city areas so it's not location dependent. I stay very hydrated so it's not the issue. Diet doesn't seem to change much either (although I do eat a bit too much sugar but my mom who has the same problem definitely doesn't). So, it's exhausting but I live with it and thank my lucky stars that it's only 4-6 times a year so it doesn't impact my work or life that much.

Have you tried psilocybin? The research seems promising.

I haven't and, unfortunately, I live in a country (HK) where the legal risk would be too high to try it.

Ah yeah I can see the problem. Apparently there is a potentially lasting effect with one dose. Maybe it's something you can vecation after. Or if the effect is actually there someday a medicine will be available.

I get headaches all the time. Especially eating some (unidentified problematic foodstuff) for lunch, but it depends on the state of my gut or something, some months it's more robust.

So I usually try to eat stuff I know has worked well before.

Headache 15% of days sounds about right for me.

Photosensitive migraine made me appreciate comprehensive dark-mode UIs. Even just a browser loading some web page and flashing an all-white document body for a moment (before applying the dark-mode stylesheet?) can feel like assault sometimes.

I'm just the opposite. I have never ever had a headache. Not even with a hangover.

You lucky lucky person. What are your symptoms of a hangover if you don't get headaches?

I also don't get headaches from hangovers, the only symptom I really get is nausea. A handful of times bad enough that I actually puked while hungover, whereas I've never thrown up while drunk.

This is me. I think I've only puked while literally binge drinking and my stomach was full. But I always puke the next day. No headaches, just nausea until about 4p then I'm ravenously hungry.

Stomach ache, tiredness, nausea, dehydration, ...

Not 100% sure on this but humans have two ways to metabolise alcohol, with one that results in hangover and other where liver breaks alcohol in one go, meaning it doesn’t release internediate product back into blood, triggering hangover symptoms. Proportion between those two differs from human to human and with age.

Downside of being in „mostly second group” is high risk of liver scarification.

I'm the same - I can count on one hand how many times a year I take a pain killer. However, I have horrendous allergies all year round, so that balances out my suffering :)

Same here! For me hangovers are just dizziness and nausea. I've found myself though saying "this is giving me a headache" in the past even though I've never had one lol.

As someone else mentioned, though I have crappy allergies. Give and take...

Same, and incidentally as people have posted about coffee, I drink maybe 6 or 7 cups of coffee a day when I'm at work and I can go days on end without drinking any at all when off work and not feel a thing. I suspect the two may be connected.

What is odd is that when I was younger I would get headaches from time to time which seemed normal. The worst I had could probably be called a migraine, I could not move my head or body without the pain surging in my head. Happened only once when I was very young. As I got older, into my 20's, I stopped getting them. At this point I can not remember the last time I had a headache.

My mom had 6-8 migraines a month; they completely stopped at menopause.

I (43/m) used to get 20 a month, but thankfully the new CGRP drugs have cut that to 1, esp since I don’t have menopause to, er, look forward to.

Did you take any antibiotic acne medication as a child by chance? I also had this as a teenager and have recently learned about intracranial hypertension as a potential side effect of some tetracyclines (I was on minocycline)

No. Neither did I take any antibiotics at the time as we were on vacation so it was a sudden onset.

I used to get migraines when I was younger. Stopped mid-20's.

I think it must be hormonal/stress related

I have weekend-inducing headaches pretty reliably (they are preventable/treatable with ibuprofen thankfully) to the point I sometimes take a lower dose of ibuprofen on Friday night to try to ward them off.

Anyone know the mechanism? I think I've isolated away caffeine dosage changes, sleep schedule changes...

It's almost like the work schedule and "it's go time" wards off / triggers some survivalist "don't get a headache now or you die".

I also notice I don't get headaches when I have common colds, when the additional sinus stress would theoretically cause more. My headaches seem to be related to the sinuses, although they have aspects of tension (jaw stiffness and base of skull) as well as vomiting and sensory sensistivity that is kinda migraine-ish, but not.

I also have seen, back when I sometimes did ironman triathlons, that headaches reduced when I got into really good shape, probably around half-ironman shape.

One of the weird things I found after returning to work after a long period of illness (cancer) was a notebook where I had scrawled all over one page, "Why do I have headaches all the time?".

I had completely forgotten about that until I found the notebook, and in retrospect one of the (many) warning signs I had missed.

I suffer from headache/Migraines since my childhood. In recent years they have become worse due to added Stress. I have searched and researched quite a bit over it. There is alot of unclear Information about it as well. The one piece of information i have found is a book by a German neurologist, head of pain clinic in Kiel : "Erfolgreich gegen Kopfschmerzen und Migräne: Ursachen beseitigen, gezielt vorbeugen, Strategien zur Selbsthilfe". it is in German though.

A condensed version of my understanding:

Basically there are two types of headaches : - Primary and secondary.

Secondary Headache are that are caused by an underlying cause, e.g. misplaced jaw or a harmone imbalance.

In the primary there are three main subtypes : 1) Migraines 2) cluster headache 3) Tension headache

All three have some similar symptoms but have a few distinctions. Also, their treatments and medicines also are different. Most common is tension which charaterised as "Pain over-sensibility", it could be due to dehydration, too much tiredness, hunger etc.

A person can have multiple types of headaches at the same time. For Migraines and Tension headaches over the counter pain killers help but for Clusterheadaches they do not.

When to tell you have migraine: - Pain at one side of head. - Light AND Nose sensitivity - every movement and speaking (e.g. climbing stairs) makes it worse. - usually not possible to continue daily activities (or socializing). - one wants to find a quite dark room. - in medicines over the counter pain killers help (esp. Aspirin). if severe Triptans may help.

When to tell you have Cluster headache: - throbbing pain at one side of head. - urge to move or go in fresh air - dropped eye lid, water eye or nose - usually starts in mid night. - very severe pain

Tension headache : - Pain goes up and down in head and shifts areas - Light OR Noise sensitivity but not both at same time - does not gets worse by moving or walking - usually possible to continue working/ daily activities with it.

The general tips to avoid are :-

- Avoid Stress - Remain hydrated - Dont skip meals - Avoid foods or other stuff that trigger (e.g. dairy, certain preservatives, etc)

adding Magnesium supplement in moderate dose helps Migraines.

hope it will help anyone.

PS: over the counter painkiller help in Migraines and Tension headaches. but taking them more than 10 days a month can induce a medecine over-use Headache.

I have had a weak headache all day, every day, for more than 20 years. Occasionally I will have very bad headaches, visual stuff etc. but there is always a background, low-level headache. It's weak enough that I frequently forget about it, but if at any given point in the day I ask myself, "do I have a headache", the answer is always "yes". No idea what the origin is other than maybe some concussions when I was ~19 -- I'm not too stressed about it but very curious to hear if anyone here has experienced something similar or has any bright ideas :)

i feel so blessed not having severe headaches, i get normal ones from time to time but nothing debilitating. Watching the movie Pi and then reading about cluster headaches on wikipedia scared the crap out of me.

A timely article for me. I rarely if ever get headaches and even then are minor enough not to need any pain relievers. The past 4 days though, I woke with a headache that was distracting enough through the day that only subsided by late afternoon. Today is the fist day I woke without a headache. I think the greatest change of conditions is that a yearlong major project just ended and that I'm much more relaxed, probably consuming less coffee throughout the day, but sleeping poorly, and not feeling exhausted or very close to it.

I used to get headaches all the time before i became an alcoholic

congratulations?

Are there any startups in this space? There appears to be one that's yet another telehealth pill mill:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2018/10/16/docto...

I always wonder if there isn't a market for a pressurised fish bowl you can put on your head: My migraine is clearly triggered by atmospheric pressure changes.

I am a bit confused by the title, and am not sure how to best word it. (English is not my native language.)

Is it: On any given day, 15% of people have a headache? (Could be different people every day, but always 15% of world population.)

Or is it: 15% of people have a headache every day? (Each of these people have a headache every day.)

Your first interpretation is correct. Though some of the different people every day might have also had a headache the previous day.

Thanks!

15% seems like an impossible high number. Especially if you realize that 99%* of all headaches are solved by (1) enough sleep, (2) noise plugs (3) drinking enough water.

* don't quote me on this.

you really shouldn't be quoted on this. You can't solve migraines by drinking water and they affect about 20% of women and 5-10% of men. Very debilitating disease and not a sporadic lifestyle issue.

I wouldn't quote you either. Its a self reported "disease" so any % are guess work at best given you didn't just make them up

I didn't just make them up and I didn't refer to self-reports. Population based studies back those estimates.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31563224/ (available on scihub)

The last time I had a headache (and a quite bad one at that) was two weeks ago when I went cold turkey on coffee.

Big changes in caffeine consumption (either way) always give me a very bad headache.

I would bet there's a high correlation with drinking coffee.

Unclear if it would be positive or negative though, as caffeine is a vasodilatador and mood elevator (and commonly used to treat headaches). At the same time it can increase stress, which would cause a headache.

Caffeine is a cerebral vasoconstrictor. Supposedly its the dilation that occurs during withdrawal which causes headaches. Caffeine has a half life of 3 to 5 hours, so without a constant stream of caffeine headaches could come in before too long.

This site gives me a headache. But seriously, if you get a headache, change something. I changed shampoo and don't get headaches anymore.

Anecdotal but I stopped using anti perspirants directly on my skin and using only no-fragrance soaps and shampoos.

Have had much less headaches since.

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