Brain freeze? Ice cream headaches can reveal a surprising amount about your health

If you’re having ice cream headaches often, it might be worth seeing if it runs in your family and taking a second look at your non-brain-freeze headaches too.

It's a sweltering summer day and you're tucking into your favourite frozen treat when suddenly it feels like you've taken an icepick to the forehead. A sharp, stabbing pain appears to come from deep within your brain. All you can do is sit there, feeling foolish as your ice cream drips, until the pain wears off.

"Ice cream headache is very, very common," says Amaal Starling, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in the US, who prefers chocolate ice cream. "It's harmless, it comes and it goes."

So why are we punished this way for eating cold things too quickly? It turns out that, in addition to afflicting generations of unassuming dessert lovers, brain freeze has a decades-long history of aiding scientific progress – and it can tell you a lot more about your health than you think.

What most of us learn as children to call a brain freeze or ice cream headache is referred to by scientists as a cold-stimulus headache, Starling says.

Researchers believe they happen due to "rapid cooling at the roof of the mouth, or even in the very back of the throat", Starling says. This cooling makes the blood vessels shrink very quickly, after which they're forced to swell back up again to restore blood flow.

Pain fibres on the walls of these blood vessels feed into the trigeminal nerve, the nerve responsible for processing pain signals from your forehead and face, she explains. That's why an ice cream headache feels like pressure and pain in your brain or forehead, not inside the mouth.

(More seriously, data suggests that cold foods or drinks can also cause heart palpitations – dubbed ‘Cold Drink Heart’ – and heart arrhythmia, especially in middle-aged males.)

To avoid getting cold-stimulus headaches, pace yourself when it comes to chilly food and beverages, Starling says. It is rapid cooling that seems to cause brain freeze, so giving the roof of your mouth time to warm up a little between sips, licks, or bites should ward them off.

But if you got overeager (who hasn't!) and already have an ice cream headache, there are a couple of proven hacks to make it shorter and less painful, Starling says. She suggests using the underside of your tongue to re-warm the roof of your mouth. Or if both sides of your tongue are cold, use your thumb or a warm drink instead.

Still, why do some people get brain freezes while others can chug a milkshake with impunity? Irene Toldo, a professor of child neurology and psychiatry at the University of Padua in Italy, and her colleagues examined four decades of scientific study on ice cream headaches to find out. (She's partial to liquorice gelato.)

Synthesising research from around the world, including studies on thousands of schoolkids in Taiwan, Germany, and Canada and dozens of adult migraine sufferers in Brazil, Turkey, and the UK, Toldo identified several patterns.

For one, the research indicates brain freeze seems to run in families – if your parents have ice cream headaches, you're likely to as well. (These findings have been just correlational so far, and scientists haven't yet pinpointed specific genes that might be responsible for this connection.)

As for how pain from brain freeze can vary from person to person, the most important factor seems to be whether you have non-ice cream headaches and migraine attacks – intense headaches that can last for hours and even days. "People with migraine usually experience a higher intensity of these types of headaches," Toldo says. In one small study from the 1970s, 93% of people who got migraine attacks had also had ice cream headaches, most of them with moderate to severe discomfort, while only a third of people who weren’t migraine sufferers had experienced ice cream headaches.

Starling herself experiences both migraine attacks and extremely painful ice cream headaches. "My trigeminal nerve is very sensitive because of my migraine attacks, and so… when it is then exposed to cold, it can be more significantly activated," she says. 

Ultimately, if you or your child experience particularly painful brain freeze, it may be worth reflecting on your headache history and taking a second look at your non-brain-freeze headaches. What you may have come to accept as normal may be a serious but treatable condition you should be looking into. "One in six women have migraine, one in eleven children have migraine, and one in 10 men have migraine," Starling says. "Over 50% of people who have migraine have never even talked to a doctor about their symptoms. There is a diagnosis. There is treatment available."

Given this surprising link, since at least the 1960s, scientists have asked volunteers to give themselves brain freeze on purpose to help study migraine disorder, one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Despite the condition’s prevalence, it is challenging for researchers to capture a migraine-in-progress with MRIs and CT scans since the headaches are hard to predict, not to mention so excruciating that it can be difficult for volunteers to make it into the lab mid-migraine.

That's where brain freeze can come in to save the day, Starling says.

Cold-stimulus headaches can be created on demand via sweet treats (and, less deliciously, with ice chips and very cold water). And because they affect the same nerve complex as a migraine attack, the trigeminal nerve, they can serve as a scientific proxy for a migraine attack mid-stride.

More like this:

• How heatwaves affect our brains

• What really causes migraine?

• The everyday activity that can reveal your brain's age

"In the earlier days of headache medicine, when researchers were trying to understand the basic mechanisms of head pain, brain freeze was a convenient experimental model," Starling explains, noting it helped scientists identify the role of blood flow and various nerve complexes.

In recent years, however, researchers have relied on other ways to trigger migraine attacks in humans – including infusions of nitroglycerin (yes, that nitroglycerin, the one used for making explosives) – to develop next-generation migraine drugs.

And for people with migraine disorder, there's no need to abstain from cold treats for fear of brain freeze. "You don't have to stop eating ice cream," Toldo says. "You can learn to manage it."

Fortunately, the advice is the same for everyone – just take a little more time when eating your ice cream, so you can also better savour those flavours.

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