Posts Tagged "neck pain headaches"

Neck Pain and Headaches

Posted by mark in Neck Pain Causes, Neck Pain Essentials |

Are you suffering neck pain because of your headaches or headaches because of your neck pain? Here is an easy way to find out.

Let’s address your neck pain first. It is absolutely vital that you address the major causes of your neck pain so that you can give your neck a fighting chance to heal. If you are hurting and aggravating your neck each and every day in every little way you will most definitely be suffering from neck pain. If you sit and stand for prolonged periods of time during the day with a forward head posture this will not only give you neck pain (guaranteed) but also can produce headaches most commonly at the back of the head and above your eye. These are by the way, easy to fix.

When you sit and stand with a forward head posture you ask an enormous amount from the structures of your neck. Every inch your ear moves in front of the top of your shoulder you start creating huge forces on your neck. Every inch from the central position creates an extra 10 lbs of stress on your neck! I would expect many of you who are reading this slouched over your laptop or computers are in the vicinity of 2-3 inches forward translation. ( see the major cause of neck pain)This means you are asking your necks to hold up a 30lb weight (your head) for hours at a time. This strains the soft tissues and can create trigger points which refer pain.

Trigger points in your muscles at the back of your head and neck can produce headaches. Muscles do not like to be in sustained contraction. Imagine if I asked you to hold your arm out to the side at shoulder height and then I tied a 20 lb bag of potatoes around your wrist. The strain on your shoulder would be unbearable within minutes (or seconds for most). However, you ask exactly this of your neck muscles day after day after day as you slouch over your bowl of soup, slouch in your chair at the computer, and spend countless hours reading driving and texting people with your head in a forward position.

This is your first port of call. To remove your neck pain you must remove the forward head posture. Not only will this allow your neck to start to heal but it will also stop your neck from hurting and may very well stop your headaches!

Please read these articles:

Neck pain-the 4 best ways to get it

Stretching- Here is one of the worst to do

Which exercises should you do for a pinched nerve

The stretch you should not do for Neck and Shoulder pain

The Best pillows-What the Studies Say

Neck Exercises-The best and Worst to do and Why

Neck Pain and Arthritis

If you are suffering from headaches it can also produce neck pain because of the suffering produced by being in pain. Having headaches can be very debilitating and stressful. This in itself can wind up the muscles in your neck. So what should you do?

I suggest you do exactly what I have written about above. If your headaches are coming from your neck you will stop your headaches and this in turn will stop your neck pain.

Migraines and breast cancer link

Posted by mark in Neck Pain Essentials |

Migraine headaches and breast cancer

According to a new study from the journal of cancer epidemiology, biomarkers and prevention, women who suffer migraine headaches are less likely to develop breast cancer than other women.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women; over 465,000 women die annually worldwide. So I guess for those of you who are unfortunate enough to suffer from migraine headaches, here is some good news.

Dr Christopher Li of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that women who suffer from migraine headaches had a 30 % lower risk of breast cancer. The reduction in risk was for the most common types of breast cancers — those driven by hormones, such as estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by estrogen, and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by progesterone.

They are not exactly sure why this link exists between migraines and breast cancer but they think it’s due to hormones. That is, women who have higher levels of estrogen in their blood stream also have higher levels of breast cancer. Also, migraines are quite often triggered by low levels of estrogen in the blood stream e.g. during a woman’s menstrual cycle.
They think that perhaps the women that suffer from migraines have a lower base level of estrogen which protects them against breast cancer.

The study involved 3412 post menopausal women in and around Seattle. Of those, 1938 had been diagnosed with breast cancer and 1474 of the women had had no history of breast cancer. The women were asked if they suffered from migraine headaches.

In this research study, Li and colleagues analyzed data from two studies of 3,412 post-menopausal women in the Seattle area, 1,938 of whom had been diagnosed with breast cancer and 1,474 of whom had no history of breast cancer. Women in the study provided information on their migraine history.

They found women who had reported a clinical diagnosis of migraine had a 30 percent reduced risk of developing hormonally sensitive breast cancers.

“Migraines are typically most severe among pre-menopausal women,” Li said. “This study was all post-menopausal women.”

Li states that this finding suggests the protective effect seen in women who get migraines may have a lasting effect at reducing breast cancer risk.

“While these results need to be interpreted with caution, they point to a possible new factor that may be related to breast-cancer risk,” Li said in a statement.