Encouraging Health

You’ve been staring at the computer for hours. You’ve worked late all week and have in-laws coming this weekend. Here’s how to identify the source of your headache so you can send it packing.

Perfume

“Strong scents bother me instantly,” says Bethany Hegedus, 35, a writer and receptionist from Brooklyn, New York. She can get a headache from a whiff of Lovely by Sarah Jessica Parker or a stroll past a Yankee Candle. Her sense of smell is so acute that she can sniff out whether a co-worker has changed laundry detergents or hand lotions, a degree of sensitivity common among scent-driven headache sufferers. The headaches can be fleeting if exposure is brief — or they can last all day.

Why it hurts: Strong odors may activate the nose’s nerve cells, which stimulate the nerve system associated with head pain. Ironically, the offending scents are often pleasant, says Vincent Martin, M.D., a headache specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

What to do: Avoid perfumes, strong household cleansers, fragranced soaps and shampoos, and air fresheners. That’s a challenge when just about everything these days is “Clothesline Clean” or “Citrus Fresh,” but Hegedus does her best with unscented laundry detergent and deodorant, and wears no fragrances. At the office, she politely asks colleagues not to wear heavy perfumes. And if all else fails? “I keep a bottle of Excedrin Extra Strength at my desk,” she says.

Weather

Studies show that the headache-prone are especially attuned to changes in barometric pressure, rising temperatures, high humidity, lightning, and cloudy skies. Rebecca Kinney, a 31-year-old librarian from Newton, Massachusetts, calls herself a human barometer. Gray skies and rain on the way trigger excruciating pain. “The headache is usually on one side of my head, and it pulsates, as if someone is drilling into me,” she says.

Why it hurts: The meteorological shifts are thought to trigger chemical and electrical changes in the brain that irritate nerves — sometimes causing fairly dramatic pain. In fact, “50 to 60 percent of migraine patients will identify a weather change as the trigger for their headaches,” Martin says.

What to do: On bad-weather days, Kinney puts an ice compress on her eyes in the morning. “Sometimes I can catch the headache before it gets worse,” she says.

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