This is just me, thinking about the way we word things here.  When a newbie comes here asking "Is this a cluster headache?"  we are prone to tell them to see a specialist in order to rule out anything more sinister.  I can't think of a pain anymore sinister than what we suffer, so maybe we should tell them to see a doctor to rule out anything that may be' life threatening'...instead of using the word sinister.  Just a thought that rambled through my scattered brain today.

Linda

"Sinister" is a bit melodramatic but, surely, some of the cluster-LIKE coinditions are more medically serious than Cluster.

From CH material I've collected I've located a table showing multiple potential causes of the symptoms that are also seen in CH:

Primary Headache Syndromes
■ Paroxysmal hemicrania
■ SUNCT
■ Hemicrania continua
■ Migraine
■ Hypnic headache

Secondary Causes of Cluster Headache

Vascular causes
■ Carotid or vertebral artery dissection or aneurysm
■ Pseudoaneurysm of intracavernous carotid artery
■ Anterior communicating artery aneurysm
■ Occipital lobe AVM
■ Middle cerebral artery territory AVM
■ AVM in soft tissue of scalp above ear
■ Frontal lobe and corpus callosum AVM
■ Cervical cord infarction
■ Lateral medullary infarction
■ Frontotemporal subdural hematoma

Tumors
■ Pituitary tumors
■ Parasellar meningioma
■ Sphenoidal meningioma
■ Epidermoid tumor in the prepontine (behind the dorsum sella turcica)
■ Tentorial meningioma
■ High cervical meningioma
■ Nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Infectious causes
■ Maxillary sinusitis
■ Orbitosphenoidal aspergillosis
■ Herpes zoster ophthalmicus

Posttrauma or postsurgery
■ Facial trauma
■ Following enucleation of eye

Dental causes
■ Infected wisdom tooth
■ Dental extraction

Miscellaneous
■ Cervical syringomyelia and Chiari malformation
■ IIH

Secondary headache syndromes
■ Tolosa-Hunt syndrome
■ Temporal arteritis
■ Raeder’s paratrigeminal neuralgia

Abbreviations: AVM, arteriovenous malformation; IIH, idiopathic intracranial hypertension;
SUNCT, short-lasting unilateral neuralgiform headache attacks with conjunctival injection and tearing.
Source: Matharu and Goadsby. Wolff’s Headache and Other Head Pain. 8th ed. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press; 2008.


Quite a few of these could easily be classified as being more sinister than CHs in that untreated they can be life threatening. So whilst the pain itself isn't more sinister, the immediate consequences can be.

But I agree with Linda's suggestion of "life threatening" since there are people reading these forums from all over the world with many not having English as their first language, so "life threatening" is a bit more obvious than the slightly obscure word sinister.