Why You May Experience Headaches After A Car Accident

If you are hurt in a car accident, you deserve to be compensated for every little damage or injury stemming from the accident. However, this is only possible if you can identify all your losses and injuries. For example, some people don't know that they can develop headaches after car accidents and may not include those headaches in their list of injuries to claim for. Here are some of the reasons a car accident can leave you with a severe headache:

Head Injuries

Any injury to the head, whether it is an open or a closed head injury, has the potential to cause a headache. The headaches occur as a result of different things, mainly swelling and bleeding of or around the brain tissues. A concussion is an example of a head injury that can result in headaches. A concussion occurs when you experience a blow to the head that causes your brain to move back and forth within your head. This causes the brain to bruise and may inflame or cause it to bleed.

Whiplash

Whiplash, which is a rather common type of car accident injury, is a neck injury that involves different tissues, muscles, and ligaments such as the cervical muscles, nerve roots, and discs of the vertebrae. It occurs if something abruptly jerks your head forward or backward, for example, if someone hits your car in the rear. Whiplash causes several symptoms, and headaches are one of them.

Pinched Nerve

Any injury that pinches the nerves around your neck can give you severe headaches. The headaches occur, for example, when the pain occasioned by the pinching of the blood vessels radiates to different parts of your body, including the neck. The headaches may also occur if the injury damages the blood vessels passing through the neck, causing your brain to receive less blood than it is accustomed to. Your brain will seek to compensate for the reduced blood flow by dilating its blood vessels, causing you a severe headache when the dilated vessels put pressure on the surrounding nerves.

Stress

Lastly, you may also develop headaches after your accident if the experience has left you stressed. There are many reasons you may be stressed after a car accident; for example, you may have to miss important business appointments, undergo painful treatments, and instigate a car accident lawsuit. All of these things are taxing both mentally and physically, and stress is a well-known cause of chronic headaches.

If you find that you have debilitating headaches as the result of a car accident, you can include this injury as part of your personal injury case, especially if the headaches are severely affecting your life. For information on how to prove the headaches are the result of a car accident to receive compensation, work with a professional car accident attorney, such as Cok Kinzler PLLP.


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