What Does A Covid Headache Feel Like:
COVID-19 is a viral infection that more than 508 million people have developed through April 2022. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that cause respiratory infections. ‘The headaches with COVID can last as long as the acute illness, or as long as weeks to months, especially in those who develop them as part of their long COVID manifestation,’ McConnell said. Many people develop a headache during the course of the infection that eventually goes away when they recover. COVID headaches could manifest differently among individuals, according to Igor Koralnik, MD, chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine.
Chakrabarti said if someone develops a new headache in the middle of a rising wave of COVID, it’s worth taking a rapid test. “I was like, I just cannot shake this headache for the life of me. I became used to it. I honestly just started going about my day with a headache,” Schmidt, a journalist from Medicine Hat, Alta., said. Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth tested positive for COVID at the start of April. The Ottawa family physician is now well enough to resume seeing patients, but she still has an incessant headache that she describes as “like a vise.”
The immune system could have been “confused by the virus to think that normal components of the brain need to be attacked,” Koralnik said. Inflammation and changes in micro blood flow around the brain might be able to trigger post-COVID headaches. Research shows that patients with a pre-existing primary headache experience COVID headaches more frequently than those without.
As a survivor of a traumatic brain injury that happened a little more than a decade ago, Heather Schroeder is no stranger to headaches. She’s controlled her intermittent migraines with medication and Botox injections since a horse-riding accident. But when she caught COVID-19 in July 2021, the headaches she suffered were ‘living hell,’ she says.
COVID-19 infections can appear with a wide range of symptoms, including eye pain. Eye pain, soreness, and irritation usually fade in a week or two as the infection resolves. However, some COVID-related problems can lead to more severe eye problems and even vision loss. Many symptoms of COVID-19 have surfaced in the years since cases of the SARS-CoV-2 virus surfaced in late try what he says 2019. Although respiratory symptoms have received the most attention throughout the pandemic, eye pain is also a common complaint. One study, published in Nature Reviews Microbiology in January 2023, suggests that around 10% of people experience long COVID following acute infection, with 50’70% of people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 experiencing lasting symptoms.
You can try OTC medications, such as aspirin and acetaminophen (Tylenol), though they may not help with COVID-19 headaches, Monteith says. Still, other commonly used remedies can help, including rest, massaging your temples, and cold compresses applied to the forehead, the NHF says. With the virus, ‘headaches generally last days to weeks but, for some people, it may be a feature of long COVID and persist for more than three months,’ Dr. Monteith says.
It’s caused by the novel coronavirus that’s known in clinical terms as SARS-CoV-2. Headache in COVID-19 may manifest migraine-like sensory disturbances such as aversion to light, sound, and smell. Learn about the main symptoms of the highly mutated and contagious COVID-19 variant JN.1 and find out how to protect yourself and those around you. Symptoms, whether they’re mild or severe, usually show up 2-14 days after you’re exposed to the virus. Talk with your doctor before getting the vaccine if you have immune system issues.
Schroeder, whose illness was primarily her headache and fatigue without any chest tightness or sniffles, was fortunate not to develop a long COVID headache, and she and her husband continue to take precautions to avoid another infection. Schroeder, for example, says her migraines used to begin slowly, giving her time to reduce light exposure and take medicine. But her COVID headache came on in an instant, and her migraines since her infection aren’t the same. ‘My migraines are far less controllable, and in the fall and early spring they were far more frequent than ever before,’ she says.
That’s also true if you’re having ‘headaches that are disabling you and interfering with your work or life,’ he says. Basically, as SELF previously reported, as soon as you ask yourself if you need to see a doctor for your headaches, it’s time to go see one. It could be long COVID, or it could be something else’and you deserve to feel better regardless of what’s triggering the pain.
In a recent review of the research, approximately half of all people with an acute COVID infection developed a headache, and it was the first symptom in about a quarter of people. Minen says headache specialists will often treat tension-type headaches or persistent daily headaches with gabapentin, a medication that’s also used to treat seizures and nerve pain. Others with long COVID have similarly reported that the headache they developed check these guys out during the infection never left. In a meta-analysis of 36 studies involving more than 28,000 people, the headache lasted up to two months for one in six people and up to three months for one in 10. Most research on COVID headaches doesn’t address whether symptoms differ for vaccinated or unvaccinated people, but at least one recent study found that for those who were vaccinated or boosted, headaches were among the less severe symptoms.
For more serious complications linked to blood clots that could affect or even destroy your vision, more intense treatments may be required. Plus, headaches, nasal congestion or drainage, fever, and other symptoms of a COVID-19 infection can also cause head pain or pressure that can affect your eyes. Many of her experiences have been echoed by others dealing with long COVID. It’s a constellation of debilitating symptoms that range from brain fog and intense physical fatigue to depression and anxiety. Many people have lost months or years to this illness and describe extreme frustration at the lack of answers.
Given the number of potential causes, she says, “it’s worth going to a clinician and seeing what the treatment strategies are.” “There are multiple possibilities at this point, and I don’t think we have a good handle on it yet,” says Dr. Jennifer Frontera, a neurology professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, who is researching post-COVID active conditions. But others might brush off a minor headache and not realize they’re infected. “My head felt like it would explode, and no medication was enough to make it better,” said Ananda Pires, who fell ill in late December. For some people with COVID-19, the pain in their skull is so intense they consider a trip to the emergency room.