Fast Facts: Headaches

The management of people suffering with headaches forms a substantial part of the workload of the family physician and the practising neurologist. While some patients can perform normally using self-medication, headache can be a symptom of a potentially serious illness and disabling headaches, either continuous or as intermittent attacks, require careful assessment and treatment.

'Fast Facts: Headaches' equips the primary care physician with the knowledge required to accurately investigate, assess and treat (or refer) the patient presenting with disabling primary headache.

• Enables physicians to distinguish between the benign and potentially life-threatening condition

• An expert guide to differential diagnosis

• Reviews current processes of assessment, summarises current thinking on pathogenesis and covers management of common forms of disabling headache

• Key points are summarised at each chapter-end and clear, simple diagrams and tables support clinical information

Contents:

• Differential diagnosis

• Epidemiology

• Clinical features of migraine and tension headaches

• Mechanisms of migraine

• Precipitating causes

• Acute treatment

• Prophylactic treatment

• Chronic daily headache

• Cluster headache; Post-traumatic headache

• Future trends