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The updated guideline covers four neurologic disorders: spasticity in adults, which is muscle tightness that interferes with movement typically following a stroke, spinal cord or other neurologic injury; cervical dystonia, a disorder of the brain affecting neck muscle control that causes involuntary head tilt or neck movement; blepharospasm, a movement disorder that causes the eyes to close uncontrollably; and chronic and episodic migraine. Chronic migraine is defined as attacks that occur 15 or more days per month, with at least eight of those attacks having migraine features. In episodic migraine , attacks occur less often. Botulinum toxin is made by a certain type of bacteria. The drug works to block release of substances at nerve endings, which, from effects in different nerves, will lead to reduced muscle contraction and less transmission of pain signals. Four preparations of botulinum toxin are available in the United States, and they are not interchangeable. The guideline up...

Using an incision originally designed for another purpose, surgeons can gain direct access to the nerves involved in some types of chronic temporal headache, according to the report by ASPS Member Surgeon Dr. Ziv M. Peled of Peled Plastic Surgery, San Francisco. He hopes his new technique will "lower the bar to adoption" of effective surgical treatment for patients with this debilitating headache condition. Efficient Approach to Surgery for Chronic Temporal Headache In recent years, surgery has emerged as an effective treatment option for selected patients with chronic, severe headaches. Developed by plastic surgeons who noticed that some migraine patients had fewer headaches after cosmetic forehead-lift, these procedures address "trigger sites" linked to certain headache patterns. Severe temporal headaches can result from muscle spasms or enlarged blood vessels putting pressure on specific nerves located on the side of the head--specifically, the zygomatic...

More than 10% of the female population suffers from migraines. Migraines with aura is seen in one out of three of these patients, who experience transitory neurological symptoms in connection with their migraine attacks. Previous studies raised concern with regard to a possible connection between migraines and an increased risk of silent brain infarcts and white matter hyperintensities, particularly in women suffering from migraine with aura. Silent brain infarcts and WMHs have been reported to increase the risk of dementia. "This prompted us to evaluate whether women with migraine with aura might be more likely to have evidence of silent brain infarcts and an increased load of white matter hyperintensities on their brain scans," says research team leader Dr David Gaist of the Odense University Hospital and University of Southern Denmark. The researchers identified women between 30 and 60 years of age through the Danish Twin Registry. This nationwide registry enabled them...

Not only does the study suggest these drugs are safe for this subset of migraine patients, it could also have implications for the nearly 10 million migraine sufferers who experience auras -- a disturbance in vision, touch, speech, thinking, or strength that usually precedes a migraine headache . "There are not enough medicines out there to appropriately manage migraine headaches," says senior author Brad Klein, M.D., Medical Director of the Headache Center at Abington Hospital-Jefferson Health. "At a time in history when an unprecedented number of people are getting hooked on narcotic opiates by way of prescribed medications -- as is the case with migraine sufferers as well -- we owe it to ourselves as physicians to try medications that could work without the risk of addiction," says Klein. The study was published in the journal  Headache . Migraines are thought to cause pain because they cause a swelling of the blood vessels feeding the brain. However, two ...

Photophobia, associated with more than 80% of migraine attacks, gives migraine sufferers little choice but to isolate themselves in dark rooms, unable to work, care for their family, or pursue everyday activities. Although photophobia is not as incapacitating as the pain of the headache itself to migraine sufferers, "it is their inability to endure light that most often disables them," says Rami Burstein, Professor of Anesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center ( BIDMC ) and Harvard Medical School, and lead author of the study. The new study shows that a narrow band of green light exacerbates migraine significantly less than all other colors of light and that at low intensities it can even reduce the headache itself. Burstein and his colleagues devised a way to study the effects of different colors of light on headache in patients without visual impairment, after discovering that only blue light hurts blind migraine patients They asked patients undergoing acu...

Affecting six to eight percent of males and ten to twelve percent of females, migraine is among the most prevalent neurological conditions. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) it is one of the top five neurological disorders and costs sufferers years of ill health. "In 2015 around 109 healthy years of life were lost per 100,000 people due to migraine. This figure could be changed for the better in future thanks to improvements in therapy options. Advances in migraine prevention give hope that we will be able to improve quality of life for sufferers in future," explained Prof Till Sprenger from DKD HELIOS Clinic Wiesbaden, Germany, at the Second Congress of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) in Copenhagen. Mechanisms in preventive treatments unclear "There is still little research on how the currently available preventive treatments actually work. One potential mechanism could be the suppression of cortical spreading depression ( CSD ) -- a wave th...