Definition
- Acute or recurrent pain in the head (cephalgia)
- Primary headaches are those in which headache and its associated features are the disorder in itself.
- Secondary headaches are those caused by exogenous disorders.
- Headaches are usually benign, albeit sometimes severe and disabling.
- Occasionally, they are the manifestation of a serious underlying illness.
- Brain tumor
- Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH)
- Meningitis
- Giant cell (temporal) arteritis
- Migraine headache
- A benign, recurring headache syndrome often accompanied by photophobia, nausea, vomiting, and/or other symptoms of neurologic dysfunction in varying admixtures
- Second most common cause of headache
- See Migraine for details.
- Tension-type headache (TTH)
- Chronic head pain characterized by bilateral tight, band-like discomfort
- Most common cause of headache
- Cluster headache
- Distinctive headache syndrome characterized by several short-lived attacks of pain per day often with associated autonomic symptoms
- Rare, with a population frequency of 0.1%
- See Cluster Headache for details.
- Chronic daily headache (CDH)
- Patient experiences headache on 15 or more days per month.
- Not a single entity; it encompasses a number of different headache syndromes, including chronic TTH as well as headache secondary to trauma, inflammation, infection, medication overuse, and other causes.
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