Trigger point therapy may help patients with “suicide headaches”

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The Cluster Headache, by JD Fletcher

Cluster headaches are nasty migraine-like headaches of such savage intensity that they have been nicknamed “suicide headaches.” Many experts have theorized that there is a link between trigger points and cluster headaches.

In 2008, Head & Face Medicine published one of the only papers available on the subject. Although this research was “preliminary and uncontrolled” and is not powerful enough to prove anything, its results were noteworthy and promising — the kind of results that should inspire more research.

All of 12 patients with chronic cluster headaches (a kind of migraine, nicknamed “suicide headaches”) had myofascial trigger points, and treating them (with injection) produced “significant improvement in 7 of the 8 chronic cluster patients.”

The authors speculate that trigger points are not the original cause of cluster headaches, but a complicating factor:

… we believe that the mechanism underlying the presence of active TrPs in each of these primary headaches is similar: chronic pain or repeated acute pain sensitize muscular nociceptors creating active trigger points which, in turn, contribute to potentiate headache pain. This kind of vicious cycle explains why the number of active trigger points has been found to be higher in patients with chronic primary headaches than in healthy subjects or in patients experiencing less frequent headache attacks.