HEADACHE FROM THE EYES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21899, 7 September 1934, Page 10

HEADACHE FROM THE EYES

In the Section of Ophthalmology at the B.M.A. Conference Dr. Arthur Griffith discussed "The Eyes as a Cause of Headache." He said that some 24 per cent of his patients came to him complaining of headache. Usually an ocular headache was frontal or orbital ("pain behind the eyes"); more rarely it was occipital or temporal, and almost never was it vertical. In the series of cases which he analysed, of 181 cases where the type of headache was noted 60 per cent were frontal or orbital. Commonly with ocular headache the pain came on in the late afternoon or early evening—that is, at the end of a day's work. Sometimes a headache was present on waking in the morning, and it might be difficult to persuade the patient that this morning headache had been earned by misuse of the eyes on the preceding day. Of course, other headaches might be earned overnight, such as that which came out of a whisky bottle. The delayed headache was probably due to the' power of the healthy human being to ignore slight pain. It was only when he was tired, or when his control had been weakened by sleep, that he became conscious of pain. Sometimes patients would say that if, for any reason, they woke in the night, they found they had a headache. Another instance of delayed pain was the week-end headache; the patient might be free from pain during tho week, but on Sunday, although using his eyes less*, ho got headache. Headaches were duo in all probability to muscular contractions in the eyes, brought about by various causes, both internal and external. Thus the early cinema theatres were more productive of "cinema headache" than were the modern ones. Much of the improvement might bo attributed to the abolition of flicker and to reduction in the size of the screen, but another factor w/is that, whereas in modern cinema theatres a certain amount of general illumination was kept, in the old theatres the house was quite dark. Alternate gazing at the brilliantly-lit screen and into surrounding blackness caused alternate contraction and dilatation of the pupils, and this might well have contributed to "cinema headache."