Headache and emergency medicine: sharing a language for a common project

Excerpt

Headache ranks as fifth among the most common medical complaints leading to emergency departments (EDs) [1]. Every day, emergency rooms (ERs) admit about 2–3% of patients requiring medical assistance for a diagnosis of headache. Woldwide, a “nation” of millions people demands to ER physicians specific expertise on headache. Such physicians are mostly specialists in internal and emergency medicine with general competences of headache management, which often produces targeted neurological or highly specialised consultations. Secondary headaches account for 4–14% of all acute headache referred to EDs [2, 3]. A CT is performed to exclude secondary causes for headache, and if this is the case, intramuscular anti-inflammatory drugs are often used for acute migraines refractory to self-administered therapy, medication overuse headache and cluster headache attacks, but sometimes, although rarely, they cannot face satisfactorily the diagnostic challenge concerning the benign aetiology of referred headache [4]. …