A woman with abdominal pain and headache

We describe a case of a 27-year-old woman who came to the Emergency Department presenting severe abdominal pain. She was evaluated by a gynaecologist and submitted to pelvic ecography without finding relevant alterations. In the successive hours, she presented severe headache in occipital region and in the posterior neck, poorly responsive to analgesic drugs. A cerebral CT scan was performed and was normal, and the patient came to our Department of Neurology. The neurological examination on admission was normal. This woman had a 7 years of long-lasting history of headache, diagnosed in another hospital as migraine without aura, and she referred a recent and progressive worsening of both the frequency and the severity of the headache. In the suspect of subarachnoidal haemorrhage, a lumbar puncture was performed, and was negative for bleeding, showing only a mild increase in the number of cells (12 leucocytes). Following the lumbar puncture, the patient presented a dramatic improvement of the headache. In the successive days, she lamented sellar hypoesthesia and, when asked, she referred a recent history of urinary and faecal retention. She was, therefore, submitted to an NMR of the lumbar and sacral medulla with evidence of a voluminous extradural formation in the sacral region suggestive for extradural sacral meningeal cyst. She was finally despatched to the Department of Neurosurgery for surgical asportation of the cyst.