8A the university daily kansan
news
wednesday, october 29, 2003
Easing the pain of headaches not easy for students
By Danielle Hillix
dhillix@kansan.com
kansan staff writer
Where there is a midterm, a boyfriend or a job, there is a potential headache.
According to the American Council for Headache Education (ACHE), 95 percent of women and 90 percent of men have had at least one headache in the past year.
Myra Strother, chief of staff at Watkins Memorial Health Center, said everyone got headaches.
While headaches are often a relatively harmless part of everyday life for students, sometimes they are a sign of a more serious problem. Strother said the type, frequency and severity of headaches determine if there is a significant problem.
Most headaches can be broken into two categories. More than 95 percent of them are either migraine or tension-type.
Migraine headaches usually produce a pulsing or throbbing pain and last for several hours. Often they are severe enough to interfere with routine activity. Bright light and loud noises aggravate these headaches.
"They can knock you out," Strother said.
Tension headaches occur when muscles in the head contract. These more common headaches produce a constant, dull ache with a feeling of squeezing or pressure.
"Think about having a tight band around your head," Strother said.
Usually tension headaches do not interfere with normal activity.
Both tension and migraine headaches can result from a variety of causes, Strother said. Specific triggers vary from person to person, but factors such as stress lack of sleep and caffeine often result in headaches.
"Students who are more stressed are going to get more headaches," Strother said. "A lot of it is about lifestyle and how you take care of yourself."
Identifying what triggers headaches is the first step to curing them. ACHE suggests keeping a headache log as a way to identify triggers. The council recommends logging a headache every time one occurs, noting when and where the headache happens, the severity of the pain and any possible reasons why it may have occurred.
Many times headaches are caused by triggers and eventually go away. But sometimes they are a symptom of an underlying medical problem.
Rachael Glynn, Orlando, Fla., freshman, started having headaches when she was 3. After several headaches and even more tests, doctors found that the throbbing pain in Glynn's head wasn't caused by caffeine or stress but by a deformed cluster of blood vessels deep in her brain.
Glynn's headaches happen when her blood pressure rises and activates the cluster of blood vessels. Because of this, Glynn has to avoid caffeine, alcohol and other things that elevate blood pressure, such as stress.
Glynn is also on blood pressure medication to help keep her headaches under control.
"But what college student can avoid stress?" Glynn said.
"I'm 19 years old and I take old-people medicine," she said.
Glynn said her headaches often get in the way of her normal day-to-day activities. Strother said that anyone with headaches this severe should see their physician.
Strother said there were many
To prevent tension headaches, try these steps for six weeks:
STOPPING THE PAIN
Eliminate all processed food, including fast foods, frozen dinners and processed meats.
Eliminate flavorings such as instant bouillon, gravy or spice mixes.
Eliminate alcohol and caffeine.
Stop all over-the-counter medicines and herbal remedies
Maintain a regular eating and sleeping schedule
Include regular baths, stretching, medication and massage in your day.
Source: Watkins Memorial Health
Source: Watkins Memorial Health Center
Center
medications and exercises to relieve headache pain, both minorand serious.
"If you're having lots of headaches, get help," Strother said. "There are lots of good things we can do."
- Edited by Abby Sidesinger
Migraine and tension headaches are common on college campuses. They can be caused by many different things, such as caffeine, irregular sleep and alcohol.
Photo illustration by Kara Hansan/Kansan
Local City commission approves condemnation of building
Dennis "Boog" Highberger, Lawrence city commissioner, said he wasn't a fan of round-abouts at last night's commission meeting. Despite that, the commission approved the condemnation of land owned by The Bungalow, a laundromat at 1900 Barker Ave. The city will survey the area and use the land to widen the 19th Street and Barker Avenue roundabout.
The commission took recommendations from a recent traffic safety committee meeting. Commissioners voted to approve the installation of a temporary traffic-calming circle at the intersection of Eldridge Street and Goldfield Street. They also voted to install a bus zone from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on school days along a section of 10th Street near New York Street and a no-parking zone on Crestline Drive near Ninth Street. In other commission items, the east side of Christie Court was established as a no-parking zone.
TUITION: $2.4 million to be put toward technological upgrades
— Amanda Kim Stairrett
Lawrence mayor David Dunfield announced the results of the can-collecting contest between Lawrence and Manhattan. He encouraged residents to continue to donate aluminum cans to Habitat For Humanity.
Dunfield proclaimed the week of Oct. 27 to 31 to be "Operator Appreciation Week." Representatives from Southwestern Bell accepted the proclamation.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1A
library databases to be easier to use. University libraries have more than 100 separate databases that students can search individually. In the digital library, students can enter one search term and search all the databases, plus Google and Yahoo, simultaneously.
The digital library can also be accessed from the Kyou portal.
Provost David Shulenburger said the University had seen success from the tuition increase so far.
He said no money was being spent to fill the hole created by the state's reduced funding of
"I wish we could get the state to step up." David Schulenburger provost
higher education. To pull this off cuts had to be made in noninstructional areas, Shulenburger said.
Shulenburger said the University's tuition jumped so quickly because the Board of Regents had to play catch up.
Tuition at the University's "peer universities" — the Universities of Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Oklahoma
and Oregon — had been increasing gradually over several years while Kansas' tuition remained the same.
Shulenburger said that for several decades, the Legislature had a zero-sum policy with University funding, meaning every time the Regents increased tuition, the Legislature would decrease state funding to keep the total amount the University received the same.
So the Regents stopped increasing tuition because it wasn't doing the University any good, he said. Then in the late 1990s, the Legislature gave the University the freedom to increase tuition and not affect the state
funds.
Shulenburger said when he proposed the tuition increase,he knew some money would have to come from the students and some would have to come from the state.
"i wish we could get the state to stem up." Shulenburger said.
But because the state hasn't stepped up, some tuition money is being spent on recruiting and keeping faculty. He said he was convinced that at the end of five years the University would remain affordable compared with other Big 12 schools.
—Edited by Ehren Meditz
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