Headaches during dialysis !

[chattyKathy1959]

I always get a bad headache about 2 hours into my session, I always feel crummy afterwards for almost 6 hours! Am I weird?? Some of my comrads at Davita say they feel better, and never have a headache....so am I alone???

[Home hemo]

My husband went thru phases of extreme headaches, even ER-level headaches.  The worst was when the pain started to cause throwing up, which shoots up the blood pressure, and it becomes an endless cycle.

Sometimes we didn't know the cause, but I think dehydration was the culprit a lot of the time.  Are you getting too dry? 

If you don't think you're dehydrated, remember that even if you still have fluid in your tissues, you can be dehydrated in your blood.  After dialysis takes most of the fluid out of your blood, it can take a bit of time for the tissues to pour more excess water into the blood, so you can go through a period of extreme dehydration if you just keep pulling fluid.  When we did home dialysis, sometimes we'd set the machine to take off zero for a half hour or so while the body catches up to it, or even add saline.  In-center, he'd usually try to drink water or ask for some extra saline, even if he hadn't reached his goal and was continuing to dialyze..

I will encourage you, though, that he seemed to "get over" the headache phase after a while and not have them for several months at a time.  He was like that with all his symptoms.  Docs thought it was just the body's cycles.

I feel for you, I've seen the pain of dialysis headaches 

[Cordelia]

I used to have this problem, for the first 6 months of dialysis. I think it was due to just getting adjusted to the dialysis. I have heard of others having the same problem, it is a common thing to have happen during and after D.

Mine went away after about 6 months and I've not really had one since.

Hang in there, hopefully they will stop for you like they did for me.       

[Zog]

Low blood pressure is one cause of headaches during dialysis, but there are others.  There are a lot of things that are being filtered out during dialysis.  The concentration of these things in your brain may be different than what it is in the rest of your body because of the blood brain barrier.  This causes fluid to move into and out of the brain in painful ways.  Google dialysis disequilibrium syndrome for severe examples.  If you can get longer slower treatments and your lab values under control you may have less headaches.  My wife recommends popcorn and ice water for headaches.

[Barbinska]

I too had terrible headaches about 2 hours or so into (in-center) dialysis.  I would feel so sick that I had to come off early at times.  I had read on this website that sometimes patients are allergic to the re-used dialyzers.  I requested a new dialyzer (dry pack) for each treatment and the headaches were almost nonexistent.  I still had headaches every now and then which were more than likely caused by pulling too much fluid.  I would ask the tech to reduce my UF goal to slow down how much fluid was being pulled.

Now I am on home hemo dialysis and I have never had the headaches again.  I am only allowed to pull a maximum of 3 liters per treatment.  If you have an opportunity to do home hemo, I highly recommend it.  I feel so much better overall and not near as many complications.     

[sullidog]

Because of my urine output they can't take anything off, well the way the machine is set up they still have to do minimum, they are suppose to give me flushes once an hour, well if they forget which happens all the time I will get one, but the major issue with my headaches stopped when my neph introduced sodium modeling in my profile, I still get one from time to time but not nearly as much.