Inflammation Causing Your Headaches

The body is still used to pumping that additional blood to the brain but now it doesn’t need it. So now instead of that additional blood bringing the blood level up to par, it’s adding way too much blood to the brain resulting in pressure in the head and a headache.

How Chronic Inflammation Creates Headaches

When the body is experiencing chronic inflammation, things start breaking down. It’s a slow but sure tearing down process of the tissues and organs of the body. Chronic inflammation causes multiple chemical processes that lead to vasodilation and vasoconstriction. Inflammation effects the size of blood vessels (vasculitic ischemia) which also can effect blood flow, causing headaches.

Also, there is a thin barrier of spinal fluid between your brain and skull which extends down from the skull into the spine. This is called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). There is a fine balance of how much of this fluid there is supposed to be. Anything that causes a disruption in that fluid balance may result in headaches.

I currently can’t find any literature about this, but my theory is that too much or too little blood flow to the brain can effect this fluid resulting in headaches. Researchers have found that inflammation in the space that carries CSF “results in headache.” As a result of autoimmune diseases, it’s believed that inflammation may occur in the blood vessel walls around the brain due to the release of pro-inflammatory neurotransmitters. For example, lupus is known to inflame blood vessels in the brain.6

Chronic inflammation lies at the foundation of all autoimmune diseases. This inflammation can occur at almost any location in the body, and unfortunately, one of these locations can be the brain.

Another way inflammation contributes to headaches is by the release of chemicals that contribute to pain. It’s been found that inflammation of pain sensitive structures in the brain with the subsequent release of certain body chemicals like substance P, calcitonin gene-related peptide, and cytokines produces pain.7

Obviously we want to avoid inflammation anywhere but especially in the brain. At the end of this post I’ll give you some tips on how you can start doing that. But before that we next need to look at what this continual brain inflammation can lead to.

Inflammation Causing Neurological Damage Leading to Headaches

Neurological damage is a common result of many different autoimmune diseases such as SLE, MS, and fibromyalgia.8 Many studies have reported that headaches are more common in SLE than the control patients.9 10 One of the ways in which autoimmune diseases cause neurological damage is by damaging the myelin sheath of our nerves fibers interrupting nerve transmission. This ongoing attack produces inflammation. There’s an entire autoimmune disease categorized for when your body attacks your myelin sheath called Guillain-Barré syndrome. When your nerves are not firing right, a host of issues results, and one of them is pain which sometimes manifests in headaches.

This inflammation and damage effects our neurotransmitters. The reason why this can result in headaches is because many of the neurotransmitters cause vasodilation or vasoconstriction. For instance, glutamate and GABA are vasodilators. Serotonin and acetylcholine are vasoconstrictors. In addition, glutamate increases pain perception. When these neurotransmitters are not properly regulated, it can lead to too much or too little blood to the brain resulting in headaches.

The take away point is if you have on going inflammation, it could lead to this neurological damage that is likely to result in headaches.