The Clinical journal of pain
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A number of classifications of headache have appeared in medical and professional journals. In addition to these formal diagnostic classifications, a number of articles have addressed the relationship of sexual functioning to headache etiology, course, and prevalence. To this end, many headache specialists have developed a classification for what are termed "sexual headaches." To date, these sexual headaches have been limited to migraine and muscle contraction (tension) headache patterns. We present, for the first time, two case studies documenting the role of sexual activity in both etiology and course of cluster headache.
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Capsaicin application to human nasal mucosa was found to induce painful sensation, sneezing, and nasal secretion. All of these factors exhibit desensitization upon repeated applications. The acute effects induced by capsaicin (300 micrograms/100 microliters) application to the nasal mucosa were studied in healthy volunteers and cluster headache patients. ⋯ Likewise, the time course of desensitization to the painful sensation and nasal secretion induced by capsaicin applied for five consecutive days in control subjects was almost superimposable to those observed in the nasal mucosa of cluster headache patients. The number of spontaneously occurring attacks was significantly reduced in the 60 days after the end of capsaicin treatment. Whether the beneficial effect induced by capsaicin application to the nasal mucosa could be ascribed to a specific action on sensory neurons remains unknown.
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Tyramine sulfoconjugation following an oral tyramine load was determined in 30 patients suffering from migraine and 14 controls not regularly suffering from headache. Reduced tyramine sulfoconjugation was found in those patients with a history of major depressive disorder compared with controls. When the patients with a history of major depression were removed from the analysis, no differences were found between diet-sensitive and non-diet sensitive migraine patients and controls.