Migraine sufferers prone to “ice cream headaches”

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People who are get migraines are also more likely to develop the unpleasant headaches that come with eating ice cream too fast, a study shows.

“According to our findings, ice cream headache is not only more frequent in migraineurs but also has different clinical characteristics--such as site and throbbing quality--when compared to ice cream headache in tension-type headache sufferers,” study author Dr. H. Macit Selekler told Reuters Health.

But to alleviate any type of ice cream headache, the message is the same: don’t eat cold things too quickly. “Avoiding ingesting cold material fast and in large amounts will work for every ice cream headache sufferer,” said the researcher, based at Kocaeli University in Turkey.

Despite being nicknamed ‘brain freeze’, the pain associated with an ice cream headache does not reside in the brain, which doesn’t have pain sensors.

Just what causes ice cream headaches is still under investigation. In 1968, British neurologist Dr. R. O. Smith repeatedly applied crushed ice to the roof of his mouth, in an effort to discover the exact stimulus. All he got for his trouble (besides numerous headaches) was the knowledge that such methods could produce headaches in warm - but not cold - climates.

More recently, researchers have linked ice cream headaches to migraines, with one study showing that women who had had at least one migraine in the past year were twice as likely to get a headache after ingesting cold water through a straw, compared with women who had never suffered a migraine.

To further investigate the relationship between cold-induced headaches and migraines, Selekler and colleagues asked 76 migraine sufferers and 38 people who developed occasional tension headaches to hold an ice cube in their mouth, and noted the characteristics of their ensuing headaches.

Almost three-quarters of migraine sufferers developed an ice cream headache, but less than one-third of other participants did so, the investigators report in the journal Cephalalgia.

In most cases, people said the pain occurred in their temples. However, migraine sufferers were more than twice as likely to report temple pain than people who typically developed tension headaches, Selekler and colleagues found.

Moreover, more than 70 percent of people with migraines who developed ice cream headaches said their pain had a throbbing quality, relative to only 8 percent of tension headache people who got an ice cream headache.

SOURCE: Cephalalgia, April 2004.

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