Headaches can accompany some brain tumors, and people suffering from recurring or severe headaches are often quite concerned that they have a tumor. But it is rare for headaches that recur for several years to be due to a tumor, no matter how severe the head pain is. Headaches usually do not occur until late in the course of most brain tumors, after many other symptoms have developed. Some patients with brain tumors do not experience headache at all.

The headache of a brain tumor does not have any particular characteristic to identify it. The pain may be over the entire head or localized in a special area. It is frequently a dull pain and may be very mild, and it may last for only moments at a time or be continuous.

The headache due to a brain tumor rarely awakens people during sleep, as migraine or cluster headaches do. Movement of the head and changes in posture may increase the discomfort, but this characteristic is shared by many other headaches, like migraine and the headache associated with fever. The brain tumor headache may be eased temporarily by simple analgesics, such as aspirin. For this reason alone, the prolonged use of analgesics for undiagnosed headache is clearly unwise.

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