Sometimes rebound headaches occur every other day or even every third day. The best treatment for breaking the rebound cycle is to discontinue excessive analgesic usage, which may intensify pain at first but may lead to a dramatic improvement in pain following discontinuance. Experience at MHNI has shown that some patients with rebound headache must be hospitalized in our special head pain unit to provide an opportunity to carefully discontinue the analgesic, treat the expected increase in headache, attend to the consequence of overuse, and develop an appropriate treatment strategy. Long-term outcome is usually excellent in straightforward cases of rebound. For most people migraine is a hereditary medical condition.
Some people get migraine headaches after head trauma or a brain injury.
Inflammatory changes develop around blood vessels and there are alterations in blood flow to the brain. The usual electrical activity of the brain may change. This complex sequence of events causes the pain and the other symptoms associated with migraine. Since the same neurochemical transmitters which are involved in migraine are necessary for other body functions such as sleep and mood, it may not be unusual for people with migraine to experience depression, anxiety, panic attacks and sleep disturbances. These associations are important in developing an effective program for preventive migraine treatment.