Migraine/Headache

To determine what dose of melatonin is most effective for treating migraine acutely in children and adolescents.

Low-value care is associated with harm among patients and with wasteful health care spending but has not been well characterized in the Veterans Health Administration.

The pathophysiology of migraine is complex. Neuroimaging studies reveal functional and structural changes in the brains of migraine patients. We sought to explore regional volume differences in intracranial structures in patients with episodic and chronic migraine. Sixteen episodic migraine patients, 16 chronic migraine patients, and 24 normal controls were recruited and underwent 3.0 T MRI scanning. The volumes of 142 brain regions were calculated by an automatic volumetric algorithm and compared with clinical variables. Results demonstrated that the volumes of specific regions in the frontal and occipital lobes, and the right putamen, were increased and the volume of the fourth ventricle was decreased in the episodic migraine patients compared with controls. The volumes of the left basal forebrain, optic chiasm, and, the fourth ventricle were decreased in the chronic migraine patients, while the occipital cortex and the right putamen were larger. Compared to episodic migraine patiants, chronic migraine patients displayed larger left thalamus and smaller frontal regions. Correlation analysis showed that headache frequency was negatively correlated with the volume of the right frontal pole, right lateral orbital gyrus, and medial frontal lobes and positively correlated with the volume of the left thalamus. The sleep disturbance score was negatively correlated with the volume of the left basal forebrain. This suggests that migraine patients have structural changes in regions associated with pain processing and modulation, affective and cognitive processing, and visual perception. The remodeling of selective intracranial structures may be involved in migraine attacks. This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Chinese PLA General Hospital (approval No. S2018-027-02) on May 31, 2018.

Posttraumatic headache is difficult to define and there is debate about the specificity of the 7-day headache onset criterion in the current definition. There is limited evidence available to guide decision making about this criterion.

The importance of neck pain and the trigeminocervical complex in migraine is of high pathophysiological interest since a block to the greater occipital nerve is more effective for some primary headaches than others. This observational study hypothesised that the response to manual palpation of the upper cervical spine predicts the efficacy of the greater occipital nerve-block.

The objective of the analyses described here was to develop thresholds defining clinically meaningful response on the total and item scores of the 6-item short-form Headache Impact Test (HIT-6) in a population of patients with chronic migraine (CM).