According to research reports, excessive sensitivity actually plays a critical role in cluster headaches and blocking the hypersensitive muscle trigger with local anesthesia may be beneficial in treating the condition.
Cluster headaches are responsible for sudden severe pain that is often centered in one eye.
Even though the headaches tend to occur for short periods, they often run in cycles, which may result in several headaches in one day or every few days.
Most people with cluster headaches experiences pain free periods of several weeks or more between each headache cycle. However, it has been estimated that almost 10%of headache sufferers experiences chronic cycles that can last a year or more.
Dr. Elena P. Calandre and colleagues from the University Of Granada, Spain, conducted a study including 12 patients with cluster headaches to find the trigger points and whether the anesthetic injections at trigger points are helpful or not.
Four participants of the study experienced periodic cluster headaches and 8 experienced chronic cluster headaches. All were totally refractory to their current prescribed drug therapy.
When anesthetic injections were combined with preventive drug therapy, they observed significant improvement in seven out of eight chronic headache patients.
The researchers found that trigger point injections is an easy treatment technique to perform and also well tolerated therapy, the main drawback of this particular therapy is it is rarely completely effective.
