Doctors Link Headaches to Tense Muscles

BALTIMORE — Doctors may soon tell patients with tension headaches: “Take two massages and call me in the morning.”

A study suggests tension headaches start with previously undiscovered tissues that link the brain with upper neck muscles.

If that’s right, ways to relax neck muscles could challenge the $2.2-billion headache remedy market.

“This may help get at the problem either with different pharmaceutical treatment or hopefully no pharmaceutical treatment--massage, relaxation therapy or an ice pack,” said Dr. Walker L. Robinson, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland.

In a report to be delivered to a Phoenix conference of neurosurgeons today, the doctors said studies on cadavers suggest that when neck muscles contract, they pull on this connective tissue, which in turn pulls on the dura mater, a membrane over the brain and spinal cord. Strained dura mater nerves appear to cause the headache.

Robinson said when he has had to cut the tissue in surgery, unexplained tension headaches disappear. But he doesn’t recommend using a scalpel to cure a headache.