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Migraine Headaches Guide
Sinus Headache
Each of us has four pairs of sinuses which are bony air-filled pockets that are attached by small openings to the nose and a sinus headache occurs when one or more of the sinuses becomes congested. Such congestion can arise for a variety of different reasons but generally occurs when you have a cold or other infection. Sinus headaches can also arise in people who have sustained an injury to the bones of the nose or who have a deformity of the nose which impedes the normal passage of air through the nasal passages.
Sinus headache symptoms will depend very much upon the particular sinuses affected. For example, an infection of the frontal sinuses which are located over the eyes will produce pain in the forehead while infection of the ethmoid sinus which are located in the deep recesses of the nose will cause pain behind and between the eyes. When infection occurs to the deepest pair of sinus, known as the sphenoid sinuses, your headache normally appears at the back of the head and this is often not immediately linked to an infection of the sinuses. The most common infection occurs in the maxillary sinuses located to the side of each nostril and below the eyes and this causes pain across the face. In all cases sinus headaches are normally characterized by a dull rather than a sharp pain.
One problem with sinus headaches is that, although it is easy to diagnose the condition when a cold or similar infection is present, it is not always quite so easy to spot in the absence of a clear infection. For this reason many people are often said to suffer from chronic sinus headaches when in fact their headaches might well be causes by something else entirely. Indeed, many sinus headaches turn out to be a case of migraine and a recent health study showed that in the majority of cases where patients believed that they were suffering from sinus headaches they were suffering from migraine headaches. Headaches can be caused by a wide variety of things including high blood pressure, eye problems, neuralgia, myalgia, allergy and even a brain tumor.
If you suspect that you have a sinus headache then it is important to have the condition correctly diagnosed by your doctor who will normally carry out a physical examination and also order an x-ray and possible a CT scan.
When it comes to finding a sinus headache cure this is normally a simple matter of providing immediate relief by using a simple pain reliever (such as aspirin or ibuprofen) while treating the underlying sinusitis with antibiotics and possibly antihistamines where the problem is also associated with an allergic reaction. Once the sinusitis is cured then headache will normally simply disappear.
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