What are rebound headaches?

Goadsby also explained rebound headaches and why they occur. He told us that:

“Rebound headache occurs when a medicine taken to relieve an attack wears off and the headache returns. Say you have a migraine that is going to last 2 days. If you take a medicine on day one that lasts for 24 hours, then the headache will return (rebound) the next day, and you need to take another treatment.”

“A big problem with migraines is that people take too much medication, so we can get what’s called a ‘medication overuse headache’ or a ‘rebound’ headache. The easiest example is when someone has some pain, and they take a Motrin, Advil, or Alleve [or some other] NSAID every day,” Segil explained.

Goadsby also cautioned that some pain medications, such as NSAIDs, taken too often, can result in stomach ulcers and other assaults on the digestive tract.

“Taking pain medicines can, paradoxically, increase the number of migraine days the patient has so-called medication overuse headache, so taking fewer pain meds stops that happening,” he said.

According to Segil, over-use of pain meds may never give a migraine attack a chance to go away.

Migraine symptoms: What to know

A migraine is a severe headache that is classically characterized by throbbing pain, sometimes covering half the head.

It may be accompanied by an uncomfortable sensitivity to bright lights and loud noises — photophobia or phonophobia, respectively — with or without blurry vision or a visual aura, a difficult-to-describe symptom in which vision becomes prismatic.

“Generally speaking, when people get migraines, there is a blood vessel between the brain and the skull in your meninges, and when the blood vessel gets too big, it dilates. It tugs on the meninges [which is] the shock absorber of the brain. That usually causes the throbbing pain,” Segil explained.

“After that, there’s irritation of the cortex of the brain, and a wave of electricity called cortical spreading depression, and that’s usually the radiating pain,” he detailed.