I have been suffering for 9 years now im 27, and i yearn for the old days where my worst would be KIP 5 and i could still manage to continue my life. It was 5 years before i sought medical treatment above standard pain killers and 1 year since i started injections of sumatriptan. These days im regularly up to a KIP 9/10.
I am new to this site but after having a look around i find no mention to this phenomon.......

Maybe im blind but id love an answer either way from anyone....

OllyJay

Mine increased in intensity from my late teens into my mid 20's. Not sure how common it is. People have posted that they started out with a KIP 10 as their first CH experience! I'm almost 50 now, not sure if the pain has lessened or if I've just gotten so much better at managing them they don't instill the fear in me they used to.

That being said, do you have a good preventative medicine? A med you take while on cycle to lessen the number and intensity of your hits? I use lithium. Verapamil and topomax are 2 other popular prevents.

And MOST importantly, do you have oxygen? 31 years of the beast it's my first line abortive and my most effective one. Read the oxygen info on the left as it must be used correctly or it's worthless. Cheap, no med side effects, effective, I can abort in 6-8 minutes. Certainly worth a shot.

Wishing you some pain free time soon.

Joe

An elusive topic, at best. We can say,

1. With aging comes more subtle conditions which cause pain. Thinking about middle years onward when arthritis, other orthopedic issues, etc. start to show themselves--often in not very obvious ways, but can yield low pain levels.

2. Several good studies show that sensitivity to pain increases due to anxiety and/or depression. Since, for example, about 50% of depression is diagnosed as manifestinig thru other medical problems (NOT mood), to the degree that advancing years leads to the developoment of mild depressions--we have a factor operating.

If you're question is: does CH become inherently more painful with time? Have never seen such a suggestion. But with these other variables operating, it would be nearly impossible to demonstrate one way or the other.

great question. i've been episodic since i was 11 and i'm 32 now. yes i can honestly say the pain has gotten worse in my older years. each new cycle seems to be a little bit worse than the prior ones. my cycles last a few months and remissions last 3 to 5 years for me.

Yup, but I figured that it was because I'm not as tough as I was..........

Yes, the pain has definately gotten worse with age,  however, now i have more weapons in my arsenal, so I dont have to suffer the way that I used to.  I can use my O2, or my imitrex and abort most bad HAs, when I was younger, I had nothing to help with the pain    

Have you looked into O2 as an abortive?

I am currentlt on the path to O2, painfully close the the start unfortunately. However the things I have learned here in the last 3 days are so comforting and supportive and informing that I now feel properly prepared to march in and get what I need from the doc. And O2 is right at the top. Also looking into Verapomil as I am currently only on Imigran Injections (btw love the tip on extending the shots)

Im very grateful that you all took time to answer my question as it has been bugging me for years, my neur has always said that i must  have been suffering from something else before, but i always felt that all the symptoms and feeling were the same just lesser.

Bob - Awesome knowledge, thanks alot.

Marc - Stay strong knowlege is our weapon.

Wishing you all PFD

OllyJay

I can only speak for myself but hell yeah...! mine have been increasing in severity and length from my early twenties to my late thirties. :'(



Lefty...!

my father, episodic like myself, suffered from 18 y.o. to 56 y.o. and his worst years were from 25 to 40 y.o., with more clusters, more hits and stronger, longer lasting pain. at the time medicine couldnt offer any appropriate medication/profilactic therapy whatsoever, until the last few years when sumatriptan appeared, but my father's CH had already started weakening by itself. eventually, after his late fourties, longer and longer remission periods followed between weaker clusters.

similarly to whats happened to me so far (27 y.o., suffering from 17), the pain was by far less intense only in the very first years, but since my early twenties i noticed that, having reached different KIP peaks (but similar patterns) every cluster, it is a factor thats often related to stress, length of cluster, medicines and other factors that have already been mentioned in this thread.

That is the "typical" progression of CH (according to my neurologist), and it has been the case for me, why I don't know, still feel pretty tough but maybe whatever happens in CH with age the body doesn't process it so well.  Either that or they just get worse.  But that's why treatment becomes so important.  O2 helps me.  Imitrex injections I use for HAs that break through the oxygen, so in other words I save those for when really needed.  

OllyJay wrote on Jun 14^th, 2009 at 3:32pm:

I am currentlt on the path to O2, painfully close the the start unfortunately.

A proper mask is very important to success with O2 so I would start working on that before you get the O2. The first time I used O2, the company gave me an ordinary face mask (the kind with the vents that fall off). The next time I talked my local ER into a non-rebreather mask (comparable to the ones that are $5 on Ebay). This time the O2 company delivered 24 tanks of O2 and no mask! Fortunately I was able to make do with the two year old non rebreather until I got the one I ordered from this website.

My clusters started age about age 26. Over the years they became more painful and the length of the cluster got longer. The worst bout I ever had was at about age 53. Then they stopped. Almost completely for about 8-9 years. This year they came back but weren't near as bad in the amount of pain or the length of each attack or the length of the cluster.