Could painkillers be causing your headaches?
What’s your response if you get a headache? Lie down? Power through? Wish you’d stuck to the light beer at last night’s party? Or are you one of the millions of people who reach for the Tylenol or Advil?
Simple painkillers are a great treatment for headaches, as long as you take them in moderation. However, according to doctors, taking painkillers too often can make your headaches worse in the long run.
The problem is that regular use of painkillers leads to changes in the electrical pathways in the brain that carry pain signals. In time, these changes make the brain more sensitive to pain.
Stronger painkillers like codeine have other problems, too. They’re addictive, which means you can get unpleasant withdrawal symptoms when you stop taking them. Specialized migraine drugs called triptans can also make headaches worse if they’re overused, most likely because they can weaken the brain’s natural systems for dealing with pain.
Drugs that can cause the problem include:
* Aspirin
* Acetaminophen
* Anti-inflammatory painkillers, like ibuprofen and diclofenac
* Codeine
* Migraine drugs called triptans (sumatriptan is available as a generic.)
Before you swear off painkillers for good, you can be reassured that you need to be taking lots of these drugs, and for several years, before they’re likely to cause a problem.
Some people who get headaches from medication overuse take around 114 doses of simple painkillers per month. Triptan drugs may lead to more headaches even when just 18 doses are taken each month. It seems to be regular use that’s the problem, rather than quantity. Taking a low dose every day is more likely to cause headaches than taking a high dose once a week.
If your doctor thinks your painkillers are triggering headaches, he or she will probably recommend cutting down. You’ll feel worse for a few days after cutting back, and you may feel sick to your stomach, have problems sleeping, or feel anxious. However, you should stop getting as many headaches within a couple of weeks.
What you need to know. If you get a headache on 15 days a month or more, and have been taking painkillers a similar number of times without seeing an improvement, it’s possible that the painkillers are making your headaches worse. Ask your doctor about better ways of dealing with headaches.
– Philip Wilson, patient editor, BMJ Group
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