Plane landing a pain for some
FLYING is a headache for many people, but for some that figure of speech becomes literal with “airplane headache”, a form of pain that flares up during landing, researchers said.
The unusual head pain – severe usually on one side of the head and near the eye – was first reported in medical literature in 2004, with several dozen more cases documented in the following years.
Now, Italian researchers writing in the journal Cephalalgia say that “airplane headache” should be considered a new subtype of headache and suggest a list of criteria doctors can use to diagnose it.
“The ‘headache attributed to air- plane travel’, also named ‘airplane headache’, is a recently described headache disorder that appears exclusively in relation to airplane flights, in particular, during the landing phase,” wrote lead researcher Federico Mainardi, of Giovanni e Paolo Hospital in Venice.
Mainardi’s group describes the cases of 75 people with symptoms suggestive of airplane headache. Those individuals had contacted the doctors after reading about airplane headache in a piece Mainardi published in 2007.
The pain was almost always short lived, less than 30 minutes for 96 percent of the people.
“It doesn’t appear to be serious or life-threatening,” Purdy said. – Reuters