Aggressive treatment Despite being the most common symptom after head injury, headaches are often ignored amidst the flurry of other symptoms collectively known as post-concussive syndrome. More alarming symptoms such as memory loss, mood swings, and insomnia understandably receive more attention. My purpose here is to redirect attention to the post-concussive headaches, for I am convinced that they are usually migraine, and that migraine causes the other symptoms. The condition often begins with headaches, the onset of which may be delayed up to a month after the injury. Often associated with blurred vision and dizziness, these headaches usually go untreated, and because of them the patient begins to have difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep.
Lack of sleep leads to fatigue.
Fatigue and lack of sleep make a person irritable, moody, depressed, and uninterested in sex. With all of this, the person loses the ability to concentrate and becomes forgetful. The degree of injury necessary to precipitate this cascading syndrome can be relatively minor because it only takes enough trauma to cause a headache. Because the definition of migraine is broad enough that most recurrent headaches fit the definition. More importantly, most post-traumatic headaches respond to migraine medication.