Although they are relatively unusual cluster headaches are considered to be amongst the most painful conditions that you can experience. Happily they are quite rare and, whilst other often painful headaches like migraines attack about ten percent of the population, less than one third of one percent suffer from cluster headaches. A lot of people describe cluster headaches as being much worse than a migraine and a lot of women say that they are more painful than giving birth.

Cluster headaches, which generally present as a stabbing pain behind one eye or near the temple, are characterized by the fact that they often occur at regular times. In other words they tend to occur at a specific time of day, last for an about an hour or less, and then strike again at the same time the next day with this pattern repeating itself for a number of weeks or even months. Cluster headaches also have a habit of striking without any warning and are unlike migraines which are sometimes preceded by symptoms like flashing lights.

Precisely why we suffer from cluster headaches is a mystery though some scientists believe that they arise out of an abnormality in the hypothalamus, which is a small gland that controls the body's biological clock and is affected by alterations to the length of the day as well as other things.

Yet another notable difference between migraines and cluster headaches is the gender of sufferers. With migraine headaches about three quarters of the nearly twenty-eight million sufferers in the United States alone are women while just one quarter are men. When it comes to cluster headaches however approximately 8 out of 10 sufferers are men.

Treatments for normal or migraine headaches are generally of little use for cluster headaches and such once miracle drugs as ibuprofen and aspirin have virtually no effect.

One treatment that has been demonstrated to be reasonably effective is inhaling pure oxygen. This treatment cannot of course be used until after the headache has arrived but inhaling pure oxygen for a severa minutes will often ease the headache noticeably.

Yet another relatively good treatment is that of taking a class of drugs known as triptans that are regularly used to treat migraines. In this case however the drug must be administered in the form of a nasal spray to be effective and this can prove far from easy as cluster headaches can sometimes cause swelling within the nasal passages. If this is the case then the drug can also be effective if it is given in the form of an injection. This again is a treatment that has to be used after the headache has appeared.

As cluster headaches appear with such regularity it would be useful to have some sort of preventative medicine that could be used regularly shortly before a headache hits. Unfortunately however because the condition is so rare and is not at all well understood we do not have a lot of information about which drugs might or might not be an effective form of preventative treatment.

In severe cases of cluster headaches surgery designed to block nerves and other neurological procedures can be performed although this should be seen as very much a last resort and it is not always entirely effective.

TheMigraineHeadacheCenter.com provides a wealth of information on both migraine headaches and cluster headaches