When I was still going to a disco in a town near Florence, in an alternative club of new wave, techno, rock and metal music, I had observed the custom of metalheads to shake their heads to the sound of music. I chose the new wave evenings but often before there were metal concerts and then a lot of long hair extended the night at the disco to the sound of rock.
The DJ thought it best to please them by also putting some metal, which I don’t mind at all but … the long-haired ones were unleashed starting to move their heads rhythmically back and forth, regardless of their hair, perfumed or soaked in sweat (the second more often) that they fluttered around hitting unsuspecting dancers like me who were just trying to make two jumps in peace.
Certainly the music encouraged movement and I wanted to imitate them briefly “to see the effect it does” but I gave up immediately moved by a slight headache. I said to myself, changing room: “these are masochists, they must have special heads to resist”!
Speaking of hard heads, that’s not what the doctors at the University Hospital of Hanover, Germany, who recently published their experience in Lancet, must have thought (1).
A man in his fifties in January 2013 arrives in the emergency room, complaining of a headache that has lasted for two weeks, widespread and worsening (it gets worse and worse and now involves the whole head). The diagnosis of migraine is dismissed immediately.
The clinical history is among the most banal: no previous head trauma, no medical history; the man only remembers attending a Motorhead concert the previous month.
Computed tomography soon reveals a subdural hematoma. Acute or chronic, subdural hematoma is a specialty of neurosurgeons and also represents an emergency.
It is in fact a collection of blood between the dura mater and the brain which, if left untreated, can increase intracranial pressure, compress the brain and lead to death. Among the causes we find more often head injuries.
But what had happened , the neurosurgeons at the Hanover hospital wondered.
Dr Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian and colleagues (1, *) are sure to have identified the cause and emphasize the concert that the man had followed the previous month, or rather they accuse the practice of headbanging (2, 3). Headbanging
is a practice that goes back to Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple, the first two rock bands considered precursors of Heavy Metal.
Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan, when asked if he invented headbanging, replied: “It’s possible, but it wasn’t really headbanging, rather hair floating”. There are different types of headbanging (3) but all of them can have harmful effects on the health of those who practice it.
Headbanging very simply consists in shaking the head with fairly violent rhythmic movements, up and down or in circles or otherwise.
Those nice long-haired people I met did simple “up and down” from which I could easily save myself by exiting their trajectory; more difficult to avoid the “circular swings” quite irritating. The other figures were perhaps too sophisticated for those long-haired ones.
Headbanging is nothing new among doctors and has been known to neurosurgeons for about forty years. The following have been attributed to this practice:
- stroke,
- carotid artery dissection,
- “flick”,
- mediastinal emphysema,
- fracture of the second cervical vertebra
- and also a sudden death from acute hematoma (2) which mainly affected musicians of heavy metal bands.
Researchers at the University of Sydney, Australia (4), have studied the phenomenon and with biometric measurements have established as the average time of a heavy metal song 146 bpm (beats per minute) which can already be associated with damage of medium entity if as amplitude of head movements exceed 75 °. Longer times or greater fluctuations increase the likelihood and severity of potential injuries.
Consider that in speed metal the frequency is even higher: for example, for Motorheads we are talking about 200 bpm!
This Lancet publication illustrates the first case in the world in which a causal link is established between Motorhead and subdural hematoma, er… the fourth case between headbanging and subdural hematoma (1).
A drill in the head and a week later the man left the hospital on his own legs.
Sources
1) A Pirayesh Islamian, M Polemikos, JK Strauss: Chronic subdural haematoma secondary to headbanging. Lancet, 2014; 384: 102. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60923-5/fulltext
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headbanging
3) https: //it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headbanging
4) D. Patton and A. McIntosh. Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers between rock and a hard bass. BMJ, 2008; 337: a2825. http://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2825.long
(*) Thanks to the lead author of the study, Dr A. Pirayesh Islamian, for kindly making his research available to us.