Fast Facts: Headaches

Providing an overview of the common medical condition of headaches for the non-specialist physician, this title aims to help healthcare professionals understand the different diagnoses and to distinguish the benign from the potentially life-threatening.

---

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