Study says professional scuba divers are less prone to headaches

Defying the myths surrounding professional scuba divers who spent long hours subject to strong water pressures and other stresses related to scuba diving and who were believed to be more prone to headache-like symptoms, a team of Italian researchers now say that pro divers may actually get much fewer headaches than other non-diving healthy people.

Dispelling all previous beliefs that frequent divers may be subject to more encephalic stress due to underwater pressure conditions, the researchers found proof pointing to the opposite. According to the findings of the research, recently published in the journal Headache, scuba divers in general were found to be about 30 per cent less likely to get headaches than healthy non-divers in the control group, and when they were affected by the malady, divers were found to get fewer headaches per month overall.

Image by Islanders Dive Center, on Flickr.

The study compared the number of "cephalagia attacks" among 201 male professional divers from the Italian Fire and Rescue Department and a control group of healthy men (matching the age of the divers) who had never dived and despite the study's findings being limited by the small sample size, its author, Dr. Roberto Di Fabio believes that these results will in the long term help determine how scuba diving might positively or negatively affect professional divers.

Di Fabio, a specialist neurologist tried to explain the possible reasons why divers may experience less occurrence of headaches, with the hypothesis that engaging in scuba diving activities might actually offer some protection.

"Exercise would be useful to make our brain less sensible to stress and avoid that even slight stimuli could trigger migraine crises," Di Fabio explained to Reuters Health through an email. "Therefore, diving as well as other aerobic sports could help in reducing the number of attacks of migraine."

However, for long, doctors have debated over the kind of physical and mental stresses that diving poses to the human body, for long believing that the underwater activity might actually promote headaches due to high pressures. Scuba divers have also been known

Image by Islanders Dive Center, on Flickr.

But during the study, only 16 per cent of professional divers experienced headaches compared to 22 per cent of the non-divers from the control group with the number of subjects who experienced migraines in both groups being as low as 4.5 per cent of the divers and 8 per cent from the control group.

As good as these findings may sound to scuba divers, Di Fabio cautioned that the results of the study couldn't be generalised to a wider population such as recreational divers who enjoyed scuba diving during holidays abroad and enjoyed the underwater sport sporadically when visiting scuba diving destinations.

"Recreational divers are more difficult to study, because the number of dives are less easily recordable," Di Fabio explained.

In addition to this, recreational scuba divers may add other variables to a study. "The emotional stress that you associate with diving is something you would see more with a recreational diver than a professional population," said Dr. Herbert Newton, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the Ohio State University Medical Center and a dive medical consultant.

"Professional divers are trained pretty well about the kind of things that you need to look for," said Dr. Herbert Newton, a neurology professor at the Ohio State University Medical Centre and a diving medical consultant. "Recreational divers know a little about that but it's not nearly as extensive."

Those enjoying scuba diving holidays for leisure are advised, regardless of experience level to get out of the water as soon as they experience headache symptoms.