A team of physiologists have unlocked the secret cause of brain freeze: that crippling headache you get in your temples when you scoff down ice cream too fast.

For the study, which was presented at the Experimental Biology 2012 meeting in San Diego, 13 healthy adult volunteers induced the debilitating sensation by pressing a straw against the roof of their mouth and drinking icy water. Then, they drank water at room temperature.

The researchers used a transcranial Doppler to study their brain during the experiment. The volunteers raised their hand once they succumbed to brain freeze, and then raised their hand again once the pain was gone.

The brain scans showed that pain was associated with a rapid increase in blood flow through a major blood vessel in the brain, called the anterior cerebral artery. As the artery was flooded, the volunteers were hit with brain freeze. As the vessel constricted, the pain receded.

The team speculate that the dilation and constriction may be a self-defence response for the brain.

"[The brain is] fairly sensitive to temperature, so vasodilation [the artery expanding] might be moving warm blood inside tissue to make sure the brain stays warm," says Jorge Serrador of Harvard Medical School. Because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure, causing the brain freeze.

The research could also help develop new treatments for migraines. That's because neurologists have noticed that migraine sufferers are more prone to "brain freeze", so if the conditions are linked it could aid research into crippling headaches.

Migraines are difficult to study in the lab, because they are unpredictable, tough to monitor from start to finish and headache-inducing drugs can interfere with the results. Brain freeze, on the other hand, can be effortlessly induced and end quickly which makes monitoring the entire event easy.



  1. the medical term is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia ...quite a mouthful...i always worry when i eat anything cold like ice cream or milk shakes because i know the pain will come....but its worth it....;o)  

    Mark hunter
    Apr 24th 2012

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