What is the cause of cervical vertebra pain and headache

Many people will measure their blood pressure first when they feel dizzy. If the blood pressure is high after examination, people will control their diet to achieve the effect of lowering blood pressure, but the effect may not be as good as expected. In fact, there are many reasons for headaches and dizziness. If you have high blood pressure, it may be caused by problems with the cervical spine. Let’s understand what causes cervical pain and headaches.

1. Headache caused by cervical spondylosis

Many middle-aged and elderly people have had this experience to a greater or lesser extent, that is, pain in the back of the head. When they go to the hospital for examination, the doctor says it is cervical spondylosis. Many people find it strange that cervical spondylosis can cause headaches. This is caused by compression of the vertebral artery, which leads to insufficient blood supply to the greater occipital nerve. So what are the specific causes of headaches caused by cervical spondylosis?

1. Because cervical spondylosis involves the neck muscle groups, it causes the neck muscles to have a long-term spasmodic contraction, which hinders the blood circulation of the muscles and causes some pathogenic substances such as lactic acid and sour skin to be released. The release of these substances causes headaches.

2. Headaches occur because cervical spondylosis causes direct stimulation, compression or traction on some sensitive tissues of the head.

3. When cervical spondylosis occurs, the headache it causes may radiate to the head through the reflex action of the medulla oblongata or the trigeminal nucleus of the spinal cord, which is also one of the reasons why cervical spondylosis causes headache.

4. Cervical spondylosis can compress the sympathetic nerves around the vertebral artery or other sympathetic nerves in the neck, thereby obstructing the contraction of the vertebral-basilar artery system or intracranial and extracranial arteries, leading to headaches.

In addition to the above four reasons, there are also patients with vertebral artery type cervical spondylosis, because the lesions directly accumulate in the vertebral artery, resulting in insufficient blood supply to the vertebral-basilar artery system, thus causing headaches.

2. Clinical characteristics of headache caused by cervical spondylosis

Headache caused by cervical spondylosis, in other words, is cervicogenic headache. In real life, how do we determine whether a headache is a cervicogenic headache? It can mainly be judged based on its clinical characteristics. So next we will talk specifically about the clinical characteristics of cervicogenic headache.

1. Clinical feature 1: Nature of pain

Patients with cervicogenic headaches usually feel discomfort in the occipital area, behind the ears, and under the ears in the early stages. As time goes by, this discomfort will slowly turn into a feeling of stuffiness or soreness. This type of headache is usually accompanied by pain in the shoulder, back, or upper limb on the same side.

2. Clinical feature 2: location of pain

The least obvious and irregular feature of cervicogenic headache is the location of pain, but the pain is generally diffuse, starting from one point and then spreading. Some patients may also experience symptoms such as tinnitus and ear swelling.

3. Clinical feature three: neck pain

Patients usually have a chronic headache in their neck. Lesions in different segments of the neck will cause pain in different areas. The distribution characteristic is that for the second to third cervical vertebrae segments, the pain is generally located in the upper cervical area and extends to the occipital area. For the third to fourth cervical vertebrae, the pain is located in the posterior lateral neck area and also extends to the suboccipital area. For the fifth to sixth cervical vertebrae, pain can cause shoulder pain. At this time, it may be easily confused with the symptoms of frozen shoulder.