Headaches and the Eye

It's been a while, my work schedule has been quite disturbing these past few days and it's quite unfortunate I haven't been getting enough time to be here for us to learn together as we have always been doing. Anyway, Thank God we get to do something today.

How has the week been with you so far and how have your preparations for the Holidays been? I am optimistic that we will all end the year in goodness and greatness, let's keep doing our best on the daily.

So today I want to talk about a very common phenomenon that all of us have experienced before at one point in time in our life, and will most likely experience it again and again sometime in the future. Let's talk about headaches and how our eyes could cause some of its occurrence.

Some theories consider the eye as part of the brain, this is because the eye has a direct link to the brain through the optic nerve which is also kind of an extension of the eye as its cells come together to form that nerve extending to the brain for the purpose of vision or visual stimuli interpretation.

Things that happen to the eye tend to have direct implications on the head or the brain sometimes and vice versa, because of this the eye has become a great tool in the diagnosis of conditions such as brain tumors, increase in intracranial pressure, and the like, this is because their impact is seen in the eye first hand even before the scan could bring it out.

If you are someone who tends to have headaches more often and drugs don't seem to work for you, the next appointment you should be booking should be an eye checkup, conditions of the eye that result in headaches are so numerous and yet very manageable, you could literally sort out that headache issue after your next appointment with the optometrist.

When your intraocular pressure goes up above the threshold you are going to experience headaches, the higher the IOP the worse the headaches, if it goes down, below the threshold, then you are very likely to experience headaches and pain in the eye too, the lower the IOP the worse the headache, if you happen to have hyperopia or astigmatism which are forms of refractive error, you will experience headaches, the higher the error the worse the headache.

If you suffer from computer vision syndrome, you will experience headaches, and the longer you go without treatment, the worse it gets, If you suffer from any of the binocular vision anomalies discussed in our previous writeup, you will experience headaches and the longer you go without care the worse it will probably get, most inflammatory conditions of the eye would present with pain in the eye as well as headaches and the longer it stays the worse it gets.

Further Reading

_{Waters WE. Headache and the eye. Lancet. 1970 Aug 29;2(7670):467-8. doi: 10.1016/s0140-6736(70)90084-x. PMID: 4195144..}

_{Friedman DI. Headache and the eye. Curr Pain Headache Rep. 2008 Aug;12(4):296-304. doi: 10.1007/s11916-008-0050-1. PMID: 18625108..}

_{Friedman DI. The eye and headache. Ophthalmol Clin North Am. 2004 Sep;17(3):357-69, vi. doi: 10.1016/j.ohc.2004.05.015. PMID: 15337193..}

_{Do TP, Remmers A, Schytz HW, Schankin C, Nelson SE, Obermann M, Hansen JM, Sinclair AJ, Gantenbein AR, Schoonman GG. Red and orange flags for secondary headaches in clinical practice: SNNOOP10 list. Neurology. 2019 Jan 15;92(3):134-144. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000006697. Epub 2018 Dec 26. PMID: 30587518; PMCID: PMC6340385.}