A study revealed that 16% of patients that visit doctors complaining of headaches suffer from underlying disorders that can be serious conditions, meaning that patients that take headaches lightly are playing a risky game of Russian roulette. And although the idea of someone going to the hospital with nothing more than a headache might sound weird, most will do the same if they suffered from what Dr. Hussein Al-Qahtani, Chief of Neurology in King Khaled National Guard Hospital in Jeddah, described as “the worst headache in your life.” “It strikes suddenly like a thunderclap, sometimes patients will start vomiting and they might fall a coma,” says Dr. Al-Qahtani. Such a headache can be caused by many things, worst of which is a ruptured cerebral vessel or a tumor, according to Dr. Hussein. “We teach people in these symposiums not to take headaches lightly,” says Dr. Al-Qahtani, “since early detection of these conditions might help in increasing chances of recovery”. If the person suffering from the headache collapses and faced difficulties in speech and numbness in limbs or face, it is very likely that they are suffering from a brain stroke, which occurs when a thrombus is formed in an artery that goes to a specific area in the brain. Dr. Al-Qahtani explains that cerebral strokes are the third common cause of death around the world, which is why they are called brain attacks, in order to reflect the magnitude of this dangerous health problem, relating it to heart attacks, another condition that occurs according to the same mechanism as strokes. Dr. Al-Qahtani advised any one that suffers from strong headaches for long periods of time to visit a neurologist to reveal any possible factors that might be causing the headaches. __
