how do strokes cause brain pain?
In: Biology
A hemorrhagic stroke occurs when an artery in the brain bursts, and there is bleeding into the brain. A common example of a hemorrhagic stroke is a subarachnoid hemorrhage. In this condition, a severe headache is the only symptom in about a third of the patients.
So the brain actually doesn’t have any pain receptors. It does not ‘hurt’ like a foot or other body part with pain receptors or nociceptors. What hurts is the parts surrounding the brain, muscles, skull, vessels. These parts send out signals when under duress and the brain interprets that as pain depending on the signal and receptors.
Our skull is a non-expandable object and the area of the brain only houses three things: brain, blood, and cerebrospinal fluid. The normal physiology is that, an increase in blood or fluid, the other will decrease to make up for the space taken. However in strokes, there is a “brain bleed” due to ruptured blood vessels. The brain itself doesn’t have a pain receptor, but when there is bleeding, the mechanism of increase-decrease could not be kept up, so the brain along with its protective cover (called meninges and they have pain receptors) is pushed towards the non-expandable skull, giving a person a brain pain.
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