Head sensitivity to touch after a concussion can be quite significant, causing alarm to the patient.
You may think that this means brain injury, bleeding in the brain or some other serious problem due to the extreme tenderness and sensitivity just from the lightest touching.
Even lightly brushing or combing your hair may really hurt your head.
Why can the head be very sensitive to touch after a concussion?
“The area of the head where the impact happened is innervated by the skin nerves,” says neurosurgeon Charles Park, MD, Director of The Minimally Invasive Brain and Spine Center at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. “These nerves can then become very sensitive, especially to touch.”
The job of a nerve is to get innervated. This simply means that the nerve receives an electrochemical impulse.
The impulse may be motor and coming from the brain (to command muscle contraction) or sensory and coming from the skin (to forward on to the brain for interpretation).
So if you’ve had a concussion and then touch your head, or something touches it like a shirt that you’re putting on, the sensory nerves in the skin of your scalp receive this stimulus.
The skin they serve is wounded and hurting, and the electrical impulses they send to the brain, when the skin is touched or rubbed, are interpreted as extreme sensitivity, tenderness or soreness.
In short, your skin took a blow and it hurts as a result. It’s like getting whacked in your knee.
Though you can walk afterwards, it hurts to high heaven when you lightly press on it.
The degree of skin sensitivity is not telling of the degree of concussion. In fact, a concussion isn’t even necessary to sustain a high degree of skin sensitivy on the head – or what is actually the skin there.
You can get hit hard in the head – no concussion, no neurological symptoms – and still suffer quite a bit of sensitivity, tenderness and soreness in the spot that got hit.
Again, this does not mean a brain injury. It means a benign skin injury (assuming there’s no gash) that can even start showing a bruise.
It can take many days for the sensitivity to wear off.
Dr. Park explains, “Patients can be assured that this will become less and less and eventually resolve with time. Usually an ice pack will bring symptomatic relief.”
