New Daily Persistent Headache

It is nice to finally, maybe, put a name to this nightmare. I've been dealing with these headaches for 7 years now, this is the first time I've seen someone else describe pretty much exactly what I'm going through. I did have one of the many (4 so far) Neuros I've seen mention NDPH, but he went right on past it. They've given me every kind of headache, anti deppression, anti seisure drug, plus more and nothing even slows the headaches down. We've tried Botox, accupuncture, Lidacaine to the occipital nerve, Cervical nerve ablation, twice, to where I felt like a drugged up pin cushion. Right now all I can do for relief is Oxycodone and Tamazipam at night in order to sleep. I've even tried Marijuana.. It sometimes helps and sometimes made things worse. I still work, but it is getting harder and harder to deal with work and headaches. I've been looking for more information, now that I have another place to look, maybe I can find something more on NDPH.
Thanks

Well finally some one has given me a clue about what's wrong with me! I have had chronic headaches for 25 years. Actually went to Vanderbilt early on and was diagnosed with rebound headaches and advised to never take any meds again except Phenergan to knock myself out. Really? I had 3 small children at the time and my husband and I owned a development company. That wasn't gonna work for me. So here I am years later taking anything I can get my hands on to make this pain stop. I wake up everyday with a headache. Really has effected every aspect of my life. Maybe this is an answer to my prayers. Thanks

I'm 36 now, my first onset was when I was 17 and ever since then I've had headaches everyday, every minute, some days worse where I pray to go to sleep and end it peacefully. As I was driving home, that fateful day, I was at the corner turning left, I started feeling nauseous and vomited right then and there. I made it home, went in the house and told my mom. I couldn't be in an upright position or I kept vomiting. We went to Kaiser. They started what I thought was an endless amount of tests and exams, terrible. To calm down the nausea and vomiting, they prescribed steroids. It helped. But I still had the headaches. They did MRIs, CTs, Angiograms, lumbar punctures...nothing. The only thing that came about was that my sedimentation rate was very high. They said it indicated an inflammation/infection somewhere but it doesn't pinpoint anywhere. They began diagnosing me as having lupus, which luckily a specialist ruled that out. No medications have helped. I hate taking meds. The good news about all those tests were that I don't have tumors, aneurysm, or anything potentially hiding. I've gone to many optometrists who says there is nothing wrong with my eyes. Then why do I feel so much pressure above my eyes? When I close my eyes and I look up, that so intensifies the pain. The "halo" around my head stays the same too.

My mom, periodically, asks if my h/a subsided, I told her no. I feel it now. She says I don't look or act like it. 🙂 I do have a high tolerance to pain, it's there but there's nothing I can do about it so why moan and groan? After 19yrs, I just went to a neurologists that I have gone in the past. He reviewed my MRI. He said nothing has changed. That's when he told me that "they" have came up with this new term "new daily persistent headache". I was hoping he would have said, there's a med that can ease the pain. NOPE.

It is true what people say. I wish I had migraines. At least then, I can have the pain subside and there's treatment for that. I have noticed that with stress and lack of sleep, my headache intensifies. Well, maybe with more research, they will be able to come up with something. Fibromyalgia was at first unknown and not understood, they have diagnosed it and now have meds for it. There could be hope.

I will continue to pray for me and you all.

Our daughter is completely disabled now with NDPH. She has been suffering for 2 1/2 years - level 7-10 24/7 with no let up. She was hospitalized in March and received 2 rounds of DHE and she has been extremely nauseous since. She has lost a dangerous amount of weight, has tried literally everything like you. She takes an inter-muscle injection of Benadryl when she has been at a 10 for more than 8 hours (it knocks her out, but she moans while she sleeps). She is on Marinol for the nausea, which only takes off the edge, and is now trying methadone for pain. So far nothing, but maybe after she gets up to the dose they are wanting to try? We are people of faith and are trusting God for answers and for strength daily until we do. Will pray for you all as well.

I joined this entire mayo network to reply to you. I read that you started having these daily NDPH since you were a teen and are already 36. I am so sorry. I started having them 8 years ago when i was 40 and my mom died and I watched her die and held her hand and it was just a horrific death. She basically drowned - she aspirated and she just kept spewing all this stuff up and out her nose and i stayed olding her hand and she kept looking at me like " do something" and her stupid hospice medication had not been delivered to our home yet. she had just made the decision to go hospice and she aspirated almost immediately so it took time for them to run the morphine over. Finally, we had the morphine and the nurse was able to get her into a coma and my last words to her was that she would wake up in heaven and she would not wake up in this horrible state again. I promised her and told her i loved her. She started to wake again and the nurse gave her some more medicine and i begged her to give her enough to keep her in a coma and luckily she gave her more and she did. She died a couple hours later so she never had to wake to that again. And my other promise was to watch out for my father which i am doing now still since he is 85 and has dementia. But during that ordeal, I had to change clothes 3 times. I was that close and she had that much of stuff coming out. And after the funeral and a few weeks i noticed the headaches start. And they got worse and since then they have never stopped. I likeyou have been everywhere. Except Mayo. They refused to see me. Said I had enough places in St Louis to see me. HUH? So I have been to 5 other headache centers where i stayed 11 days to 3 weeks and had a neurostimulater put in and nerve decompression on the forehead and ocipital in the back of neck and just had a TMJ surgery and he said No, that's not it. So many ablations, nerve blocks, all kinds of IV treatments , even IV histamine to see if they could get me use to histamine since Benadryl IV is the only thing that helps me for a little while when i am in the ER. ONly for an hour though. Nothing works so i finally stopped my job 18 months ago and now I am 48 and lost a great job that paid great i went to a great university with a business degree and always was successsful. I did have a great disability package and still do get paid well with that but not like i use to get paid and my kids are now gone to college and they saw me go from a wonderful mom to mentor to a slug of a mother to never want to be like. DO you ever feel that way? Did you ever have children with all the pain? I can't imagine having a baby with all this pain. I wouldn't be able to. I wanted to adopt a daughter so bad. We have 2 boys but i know i cant even do more than 1 thing a day i can't handle a baby. And I went into menopause the same time my mom died and when these headaches started. Don't worry we checked my hormones a million times and I sought out every specialist in hormone replacement therapy first and trust me, it didn't help. it made it worse. so now I am on nothing. i just saw your story and realized you are the first person I have read about that has had it longer that me and i wonder how do you get past the feeling that we won't find a cure? Do you still allow yourself to hope? To keep looking? I keep looking and trying and allow myself to cautiously be otpimistic but now, after this last one I am not sure I can continue to hope. this last one really shot me down. And I have tried taking too many meds before and I don't want to do that again so I wonder how you get through it. Do you try to just live with it and not pretend it may get better or do you still think it will? I don't know what the healthiest way to handle it is? I went to counseling for almost a year. And I found i am better when i don't go. I tend to just talk and go over and over and over the same things and it makes me just re hash how bad things are. I am better without that. How about you? What do you do to just try to stay positive and not get so upset treatmetns fail? I want you to know what an inspiration you are to me. I understand what it is like to lie in your bed and be so uncomfortable that you can't lay down or stand up. It is like you can't do anything to get relief. So i want you to know i understand and I just am so proud of you for doing it for so long and if you have anything you can teach me i will listen. You are my inspiration and as I said I only joined this because I read your story. yOu are a wonderful person and i hope nothing but good things for you.

Several months ago I started going to the Michigan Head Pain and Neurological Institute, which is supposed to be the go-to place for headaches. My headache started in may of 2002, it was the day I started my first "real" job after college. I had it for several weeks and just when I was going to do something about it, it stopped for a few days. I went through periods of being uninsured, so the HA went untreated. I finally went to a neuologist in 2004 who told me I had tension headaches and tried me on all kinds of meds, but nothing helped. I felt like he wasn't paying attention to me, so I stopped going and continued on. Meawhile, the headaches kept getting worse and staying for longer. I tried chiropractic, went to an endocrinologist, another neurologist and finally went to MHNI. I've been trialed on about 15 different meds, had nerve block injections and nothing helps. If something works a little today, there's no guarantee that it will work tomorrow. The neurologist actually never dx me with NDPH, but the woman who did my EEG mentioned it. The symptoms fit me to a T. I can pinpoint exactly what day they started, they're not responsive to any medication. Sometimes my jaw hurts and when its really bad, my inner ear hurts. Next I'm starting PT. During my PT eval, she told me I have hyperflexion which by reading a lot about NDPH, isn't uncommon. When I talk to my doctor I feel like I'm not making any sense, being stubborn or whatever because literally nothing is helping and I'm getting frustrated. This treatment isn't cheap. Reading that other people feel the same way I do is helpful, but just writing about it makes me want to cry. I don't want to have a HA for another 20 years until someone figures it out. has anyone found something that helps?

I'm 41 now, and I've had NDPH for going on 6.5 years. I was a civil litigation attorney at a small firm, and things were really beginning to gel for me at work. The one day I woke in the middle of the night with the worst headache of my life. When it didn't go away, I went to Kaiser, and my docs diagnosed me with a migraine. It didn't take long for me to realize that I couldn't work anymore. I was quickly introduced to another side effect of the NDPH, cognitive slowing. After burning through all my vacation and sick time, it was obvious that my inability to make deadlines or even understand the cases or documents I was reading precluded me being a lawyer. Thankfully, I had private disability insurance that has helped me pay the bills, and though I live alone, a supportive family to pick up the slack.

None of the drugs I've tried has helped, and while I haven't tried as many as some of you in this thread, I've certainly had my share, including botox and a course of DHE. My pain level varies between a 4 and 8 on most days with light and sound sensitivity, and I've just about worn my docs out with the "What next?" question. I feel as if I'm done with the prescription meds. The side effects were awful, and with so many of them, you have to take them for a while before you can tell if they are effective (or not in my case). I've also been to the Stanford Neuroscience Pain Clinic, where one of the doctors (Dr. Cowan) has chosen NDPH as his research field. I've been meaning to sign up for his study, even though his treatment recommendation didn't work either. Most of my doctors shrug their shoulders now, unsure what to tell me. My primary has just suggested narcotics, not as a cure, but to attempt to improve my daily quality of life, even if I'm not able to go back to work. I'm considering it, but don't feel I'm quite ready for that step, esp considering the rebound headaches!

Last year, I was referred to an acupuncturist by a friend who had been cured of her infertility, and after a month of treatment, I saw results. I've had one brief (3-hr) window where my pain level was virtually eliminated, and that was after an acupuncture treatment by this out-of-plan provider. My nausea and vertigo have also been nearly nonexistent since I've been doing acupuncture. Because of that, I'm still working with the acupuncturist, and even though I haven't had a repeat of that amazing, unbelievably blissful 3 hours, I hold out hope that if it happened one, it can happen again. I also continue to make dietary changes and have discovered a dairy intolerance (though I went to a nutritionist early in my illness and tested negative for food allergies and sensitivities). Each day, I aim to stagger the healthy activities (swimming or playing with my dog) and the necessary activities (dishes, laundry) with my time laying down reading or just being still in a dark, quiet place, with an ice pack on my head. That has helped reduce the number of days I'm in bed all day. I also just started doing biofeedback - referred out of plan by my neurologist, again for only 6 visits. If I'm remembering correctly, the mayo clinic site has a good description of biofeedback and its benefits.

I would encourage all of you to try alternative treatments like this, outside of an established health-care plan, if necessary. I say this because western medicine doesn't have an answer or cure for NDPH, and who's to say that the "one pill to fix it all" approach isn't the wrong one for this condition? Eastern medicine is all about bringing balance back to the body. I like the idea of bringing balance back into my life and that everything I do has an effect on my head. And my current treatment plan is a lot easier on my body than all those meds. Kaiser offers acupuncture, too, but they are limited in the number of treatments (6 per year per condition/referral) as well as the scope of their treatment (limited based on referral diagnosis). Obviously, you will want to do your research on providers. I've met some weirdos in my journey and was so happy to find a reputable and knowledgeable provider. Currently, we're working on a liver detox, as my digestive organ pulses seem to be tied to my pain levels. I'll let you all know if there's any progress! Good luck to all of you.

@quasar I see that you just joined Mayo Connect and I want to welcome you! It sounds as if you have had some serious issues with headaches and treatments that were not very helpful Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm pleased that you have found some relief.

Thank you @quazar for adding your experience and updating this discussion. I have moved it into the Chronic Pain group to help others find it. Here is the information about Biofeedback from the Mayo Clinic to which you referred http://mayocl.in/1oSW9p0 Like Teresa, I'm glad you finally found some relief. We all will be interested in hearing about your progress and sustained relief.

I read in your message that the desperate need for pain relief led you to try almost anything, and that on this journey you "met some weirdos". How did you evaluate the care providers and treatments your tried? What cautions did you take to not be sold "snake oil" cures? What tips would you offer other members who are equally desperate for pain relief?

Have you tried legal medical cannibis? I am impressed with it for pain relief.<br><br>