Older patients often show more spinal degeneration on MRI but report fewer headaches. Jeff Langmaid explains this matches what we know about aging: headaches actually decline with age, and MRI can't see the things that matter most, like hormones, stress, and mental health.
Older patients had more degeneration on their MRIs, but they also had fewer reported headaches. Now, that fits with what we know from an epidemiological perspective. Headache prevalence drops with age. So that's one aspect. Let's talk about the symptom focus, so to speak. So these patients, again, were referred primarily for neck pain. So it is possible that they underreported or actually kind of deprioritize their headaches compared to their neck symptoms, because the neck pain was really the primary thing that they were dealing with. Right. So just a comparative effect, so to speak. And then there's other factors that there's a plethora of hormones, stress, mental health, social context. All of these, we know, play a massive role in headache frequency and severity. And none of those, of course, show up on imaging and specifically an MRI.
