Does High Blood Pressure Cause Headaches?

Though high blood pressure generally gives off little or no signs in the early stages, a headache is generally associated as being among the symptoms of hypertension. It is assumed by most people who have high blood pressure that when they get a headache it means that their pressure has gone up. The situation here is that both headache and high pressure are very common. This means that it is certainly true that the two can occur together. The question is however whether there is any connection between them at all.

The fact remains that there is no connection generally between these two. It has never been established for sure that there is a tendency for headaches to manifest when the pressure shoots up, or also that headaches are symptoms of elevated pressure. Whether or not the patients were taking medications also had no effect on the association between the two.

However, there is some evidence from other studies that people with hypertension are more likely to suffer from migraine headaches. These problems are usually countered by using pressure lowering drugs such as calcium channel blockers and beta-blockers. What has to be inferred here is that if there are headaches treat it with the traditional pain killers such as aspirin instead of being unduly worried about your blood pressure.

Based on a study conducted on 22,685 adults those with a systolic pressure of 150 mm Hg or higher had 30% lower risk of having non-migrainous headache at follow up compared with those with systolic pressure lower than 140 mm Hg. For diastolic pressure, the risk of non-migrainous headache decreased with increasing values.

There is a consensus agreement that chronic arterial hypertension of mild to moderate degree does not cause headaches. Most of the studies on this subject done on a wide cross section of population have shown no association, negative or positive between high pressure and the prevalence of high headaches. In some studies, however, a higher prevalence of headache and migraine has been reported in hypertensive patients than among normal controls. Other studies have found a higher prevalence of hypertension among patients who have headaches or migraine than among headache free people.