#1042 What causes an ice cream headache?

What causes an ice cream headache? It is caused when something cold touches the roof of the mouth and makes the blood vessels constrict.

It turns out that no one knows for definite what causes an ice cream headache. Many of us have experienced one and it is also called brain freeze. Its official name is “cold-stimulus headache”. If you eat a lot of ice cream, or drink a cold drink very fast, you will probably experience an ice cream headache. The pain will be sharp, and it is usually in the front of the brain, behind the forehead, or just to the sides, by the temples. Many people put their hands to the front of their heads to try and stop the pain, or to warm the brain, but that is not where the pain is coming from, and it will not stop the headache. The sharp pain can spread to behind the eyes, but it usually only lasts a few seconds, sometimes a minute, before fading away. If someone carries on eating the same cold food, the pain might return. So, what causes it?

A fair amount of research has been done into ice cream headaches, but the actual mechanism is unknown. The most common theory is that the cold affects the blood vessels in the roof of the mouth and the sinuses. The front part of the roof of your mouth is called the hard palate and the back part is called the soft palate. Directly above these are the sinuses. Throughout the roof of the mouth and the sinuses are many capillaries carrying blood and when you eat something cold, those capillaries constrict. This is a natural reaction when we experience cold. Our blood vessels and capillaries constrict near places that are cold to reduce blood flow and conserve heat. That usually happens in the skin and is why people go pale when they are cold. The capillaries sense the cold in the roof of the mouth and constrict. The cold doesn’t last very long and as soon as the capillaries have warmed up again, they dilate to increase the blood flow.

There are a lot of pain receptors in the roof of the mouth, and they detect the dilation of the blood capillaries. They send this signal to the brain up the trigeminal nerve, which is the nerve responsible for all sensation in the face and for moving the muscles so we can bite and chew. The nerve relays this pain signal to the brain, but the brain is unable to tell where the signal has come from, and mistakenly assumes it is coming from the forehead. Your forehead isn’t experiencing any pain, but your brain tells you that the pain is coming from your forehead and your forehead starts to hurt. That is the power your brain has. The only way to stop an ice cream headache is to warm up the roof of your mouth with your tongue and to get the blood capillaries to dilate as quickly as possible. You will still get an ice cream headache, but it might pass quicker.

An ice cream headache is a very interesting example of something called referred pain. This is where the brain can’t tell exactly where pain is coming from and decides that it is coming from somewhere else. A very well-known example is left arm pain during a heart attack. The nerves that send signals from the left arm and the nerves that send signals from the heart to the brain both end up in the same place in the brain. If you have a heart attack, the pain is generally on the left side of the body because the heart is on the left side of your body, and the brain cannot pinpoint the origin. It may assume that it is the arm, or sometimes the left side of the neck, and these places begin to hurt because the brain can decide what is going to hurt. Phantom limb pain is also an example of referred pain. Even though the limb and the nerves are no longer there, the brain can misinterpret a signal that the Iimb hurts and the brain can make it hurt, even though there is no limb left to hurt. There are several theories, but no one knows what causes referred pain, just like no one knows what causes an ice cream headache. One interesting fact is that animals can suffer from referred pain as well, but with animals it takes a while for the brain to decide that an area hurts, while, with humans, it is almost instant.

Photo by JÉSHOOTS: https://www.pexels.com/photo/dessert-ice-cream-summer-sweet-3631/

Sources

https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/newsroom/articles/year-2023/aug-brain-freeze.html

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/headache/ice-cream-headache

https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/what-causes-ice-cream-headache

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/244458#causes

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21478-brain-freeze

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold-stimulus_headache

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigeminal_nerve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referred_pain

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2126629/pdf/9161304.pdf

https://teachmeanatomy.info/head/other/palate