Headache is very present in our lives. In fact, between 92 and 99 percent of women in Spain suffer some episode of headache every year, as pointed out in the latest edition of the Official Clinical Practice Guide on Headaches of the Spanish Society of Neurology. But what do these figures mean? The truth is that there is no single answer because headache does not affect the entire population in the same way.
On the one hand, there are primary headaches, in which pain is the main symptom, such as migraines, and secondary headaches, in which pain is one of the symptoms of another pathology, such as the flu.
Tension is the main cause of headache, followed by migraine, which chronically affects 3 percent of the population. The abuse of medication, physical exercise or menstruation, due to the drop of estrogens in the cycle, are also direct causes of headache.
On the other hand, pain can manifest itself as a symptom of the disease due to metabolic disturbances, hangover, fever, fasting, nose, sinus or eye disorders or head trauma. But headache is also behind autoimmune diseases such as Lupus or Behçet's disease, candidiasis and even environmental syndromes.
The biological medicine is a very appropriate approach for this type of chronic ailments. As explained by the medical director of Biosalud Day Hospital, Dr. Mariano Bueno, exclusive treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs does not permanently eliminate pain and also has side effects. In fact, this type of medication, as well as analgesics, lose effectiveness due to overuse. Biological medicine searches for the cause of diseases and uses techniques such as molecular hyperthermia, cryoelectrophoresis or neural therapy to treat pain.
While it is true that chronic pain is more present in the musculoskeletal system of people, headache is very disabling (for example, around 20 percent of people suffering from migraine must remain at rest during episodes of pain) and increasingly chronic, among other causes due to the abuse of medications mentioned above.
In many cases, viral or bacterial infections are accompanied by headache and other symptoms resulting from inflammation of the brain tissue. In such cases, treatment is complex because it requires addressing both the inflammation and the infection at the same time. This is the case, for example, with Lyme disease, a bacterial infection, and others such as enterovirus or Zika.
As specialists in the treatment of Lyme disease and other infectious diseases, we understand thatencephalopathy does not describe a specific condition but is a general term to describe a change in brain tissue status and in fact, the symptoms go beyond headache.
Early Lyme patients present with flu-like symptoms, including headache. If Lyme is chronic, symptoms such as mental confusion, memory loss or difficulty concentrating manifest themselves. The European Federation of Neurological Societies (EFNS) describes Lyme disease neuroborreliosis as an infection of the nervous system caused by the bacterium borrelia bugdorferi.
At a center like Biosalud Day Hospital, we combine antibiotic treatment to eradicate the infection with biological medicine and the strict nutritional aspects involved to control inflammation. It is estimated that about 5 to 20% of patients with Lyme disease present with neurological symptoms and this happens when Borrelia spirochetes break the blood-brain barrier and can be identified by the presence of specific antibodies in the CSF.
If you are concerned about neurological symptoms and they coincide with other symptoms of Lyme, be sure to consult a Lyme doctor. This is a complex disease and requires treatment to address all of its manifestations simultaneously.
//Esta es información general y no sustituye a un diagnóstico ni prescripción de tratamiento médico. Ante cualquier duda o problema de salud, consulte a un especialista.//
