American Board of Headache Management

CONGRATULATIONS to the American Board of Headache Management Awardees!

American Interventional Headache Society is offering American Board of Headache Management (ABHM) certification to qualified physicians. The AIHS Board has approved the board certification program which will enable physicians to document knowledge, training and skills in this new subspecialty of pain management. This board certificate program, will require candidates to provide evidence of prior training and experience, and successfully complete a written as well as an oral and practical exam.

Medication Overuse Headache Basics

Medication overuse headache (MOH) is a secondary headache disorder that is due to excessive use of acute medications. This usually happens when patient with pre-existing primary headache disease most commonly chronic migraine exceed the threshold for using acute medications for temporary symptomatic relief of their headache. MOH can also occur with withdrawal of acute medication triggering an attack or worsening of pre-existing primary headache disorder. This is also known as rebound headache. This typically leads to increase in headache days and escalating doses of acute medications. If headache worsens with amplified use of acute medications or improves once they are discontinued the diagnosis is supported.

Sphenopalatine ganglion stimulation in cluster headaches

Cluster headaches are characterized by severe debilitating pain which is often refractory to treatment. It is described in the ICDH-3 Beta headache criteria as consisting of attacks of severe, strictly unilateral pain which is orbital, supraorbital, temporal or in any combination of these sites, lasting 15-180 minutes and occurring from once every other day to eight times a day. The sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG) has been implicated in the pathophysiology of cluster headache, and therefore has been targeted to treat cluster headaches. In an article published in Cephalalgia, authors Láinez Marti reviewed the published literature on SPG stimulation and cluster headaches. An SPG stimulator is a device inserted by a minimally invasive procedure in which a neurostimulator directly and reversibly stimulates the area of the SPG. They found evidence that demonstrated that SPG stimulation is a safe and effective treatment for chronic refractory cluster headache patients, effective in both acute at- tacks and as a preventative treatment.

Read more here:http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0333102416644968