Ice Cream Headache or Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia

Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia (nerve pain of the sphenopalatine ganglion).

 A migraine triggered by eating cold foods (oropharyngeal irritation due to cold foods), the ingestion of which may cause bi-frontal headaches in Patients with migraines. Also known as brain freeze, cold-rush, cold-stimulus headache particularly following quick consumption of cold beverages or foods such as ice cream and ice pops.

(Picture credit ; visualize us)

The term "ice-cream headache" has been in use since 31 January 1937, contained in a journal entry by Rebecca Timbres
The first published use of the term "brain freeze", as it pertains to cold-induced headaches, was on 27 May 1991

And although you may feel pain, it's not dangerous and doesn't mean that anything is wrong in your body.
The ice cream headache passes quickly with a lovely rush of pain-killing endorphins cancelling out the pain.
   

  Symptoms

• Sharp, stabbing pain in the forehead

• Pain that peaks about 30 to 60 seconds after it begins

• Pain that rarely lasts longer than five minutes

 Classification
The International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD) code is 13.11.2 and International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems ICD-10NA code is G44.8021, "Headache attributed to ingestion or inhalation of a cold stimulus".

Risk Factors;
Ice cream headaches can affect anyone. But you may be more susceptible to ice cream headaches or have more-severe ice cream headaches if you're prone to migraines. The headaches may also be more common among people with a history of head injuries.
 

Cause
Theory 1
   When something cold touches the roof of your mouth (palate), the sudden temperature change of the tissue stimulates nerves to cause rapid dilation and swelling of blood vessels. This is an attempt to direct blood to the area and warm it back up. The dilation of the blood vessels triggers pain receptors, which release pain-causing prostaglandins, increase sensitivity to further pain, and produce inflammation while sending signals through the trigeminal nerve to alert the brain to the problem. Because the trigeminal nerve also senses facial pain, the brain interprets the pain signal as coming from the forehead. This is called 'referred pain' since the cause of the pain is in a different location from where you feel it. Brain freeze typically hits about 10 seconds after chilling your palate and lasts about half a minute. Only a third of people experience brain freeze from eating something cold, though most people are susceptible to a related headache from sudden exposure to a very cold climate.

An ice cream headache is the direct result of the rapid cooling and rewarming of the capillaries in the sinuses. A similar but painless blood vessel response causes the face to appear "flushed" after being outside on a cold day. In both instances, the cold temperature causes the capillaries in the sinuses to constrict and then experience extreme rebound dilation as they warm up again.

Theory 2
  The research, carried out in part by Harvard Medical School, used trans-cranial Doppler imaging to study blood flow in the brains of patients while they had ice cream headaches or brain freeze induced using iced water. They also performed the experiment with normal water as a control.

The results, which are being presented at the Experimental Biology 2012 conference, show that brain freeze is accompanied by a rapid dilation of the anterior cerebral artery, which floods the brain with blood and in turn causes pain. When the vessel constricts, patients report that the pain disappears. The researchers speculate that it's a form of self-defense for the brain:

    "The brain is one of the relatively important organs in the body, and it needs to be working all the time,... It's fairly sensitive to temperature, so vasodilation might be moving warm blood inside tissue to make sure the brain stays warm."
  

Brain Freeze (Picture credit; chemistry about)

They also explain that, because the skull is rigid, an increase in blood volume in the brain causes an increase in pressure, which is what induces the pain.

The researchers point out that similar blood flow alterations could be behind migraines and other types of headaches. If that's the case, targeting headaches with drugs that can specifically affect dilation of blood vessels could bring a lot of relief to an awful lot of people.

Prevention
• Slow down. Eating or drinking cold food slowly allows one's mouth to get used to the temperature.

• Hold cold food or drink in the front part of your mouth and allow it to warm up before swallowing.

• Head north. Brain freeze requires a warm ambient temperature to occur, so it's almost impossible for it to happen if you're already cold.



 

Treatment
It does not require any medical treatment, but relief can be gotten from one of these;
pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to warm the area or
tilting the head back for about 10 seconds.
drink a liquid that has a higher temperature than the substance that caused the ice cream headache.
breathing in through the mouth and out through the nose, thus passing warm air through the nasal passages.



NOTES;

1. Bird, N; MacGregor, EA; Wilkinson, MI (January 1993). "Ice cream headache—site, duration, and relationship to migraine". Headache 32 (1): 35–8.

2. "ICHD-II Abbreviated pocket version" (pdf). International Headache Society. 2004.

3. Gordon, Serena (February 2003). "The Scoop on Ice-Cream Headaches". Current Science 88 (13): 12

4. Headache Classification Subcommittee of the International Headache Society. The international classification of headache disorders: 2nd edition. Cephalalgia. 2004;24(suppl):9.

5. Jankelowitz, SK.; Zagami, AS. (Dec 2001). "Cold-stimulus headache.". Cephalalgia 21 (10): 1002.

6. Mayo Clinic | ice-cream-headaches

7. Mental floss | why do people get ice cream headaches

8. Medical News Today | articles; 244458.

9. Timbres, Harry; Timbres, Rebecca (1939). "We didn't ask Utopia: a Quaker family in Soviet Russia". Prentice Hall.

10. Wikipedia | Ice cream headache