For CH, the incidence is around "124 per 100,000 people" (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
) although the numbers vary with most sources quoting around 100 per 100,000 people.
For concussion I've not (after a few minutes of searching) found a solid figure, with the best I could do being "536 admissions per 100,000 people in a report that included emergency department visits, hospital discharge and coroner reports" (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
). These figures are per year, so working off the US life expectancy of 78.8 years (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
), this suggests a lifetime incidence of 78.8 x 536 per 100,000, i.e. 42,237 per 100,000.
This covers not just concussion but all traumatic brain injuries but note that if someone had a concussion, just saw a GP or similar and didn't go to hospital then they'd not be counted in these figures, so the actual incidence will be higher. But estimating how much higher will be complex and error prone.
So:
- CH - 1 per 1000 people (0.1%)
- head injury - 42 per 1000 people (4.2%)
Brian's reports show that many people he spoke to had had a head injury, so the 4.2% is most likely very much on the low side, but one could presume that if CH can result from a head injury then it is likely to be from a more severe head injury, so one involving a hospital admission or similar, so using the 4.2% figure is likely to be a reasonable estimate for the purposes of this study.
So if we take someone at random who has CH, then if there is no relationship between CH and head injury then there is likely to be a 4.2% chance that they will have had a head injury (very simplistic model as it does not take into account things like the figures include head injuries that killed the person, average age for CH onset and many other factors).
Looking at the number of people here on the forums (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
), with 11,029 members and assuming that 10,000 have CH with the rest being supporters, this would suggest that around 420 people will have had a head injury too. Such people are more likely that most to respond to a topic like this too, so the incidence may appear to be even higher.
A study could be done looking at for those who have a head injury and doing a long term follow up to look at the incidence of CH. If there is no relationship then you'd expect to see about 0.1% of them have CH, but if there is a relationship then this would be significantly higher.
Assuming a connection, what we don't know is how quickly the CH would develop. Looking at parallel cases where NFL players and boxers develop brain issues, this seems to happen months to years after the injury. But for a CH link this may or may not be the case.
As to a mechanism for this to happen, CH has been shown to be strongly linked to the hypothalamus area of the brain. So since a head injury results in damage to the brain the potential mechanism could be that the head injury results in damage to the hypothalamus.
Looking on PubMed for research linking concussion and headaches (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
) shows several hundred results, with 9 covering CH and concussion (Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to
or
).
Of these, 4 are potentially applicable to CH:
- Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to or - The headache may be nonspecific or mimic common nontraumatic headache disorders such as tension, migraine, and cluster.
- Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to or - migraine- or cluster-like headache can be observed in rare cases
- Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to or - This clustering of migraine symptoms supports the existence of PTM as a distinct clinical entity in some patients. [Not CH, but a strong parallel]
- Multimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!! You need to or - The patients' medical history revealed a significantly high incidence of peptic ulcer disease and head injury with brain concussion. It is stressed that the side on which head injury took place is very frequently the same side on which cluster headache is located, although the latency between the two events appears to be a long one.
Now to turn all this from a hypothesis to a proven (or not) link will take a lot of work in accurately modelling what the expected results should be (i.e. not using my very simplistic model) and then doing a large scale followup on people with head injuries to determine their incidence of CH.
The last of the 4 links above covers a study looking at patients with CH to review their medical history and from the wording it implies a statistically significant linkage between the two.
So on the basis of the current research, there is possibly a link between them.
Home
Pages: 1 
