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Cervicogenic Headache

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Spine Pain Care

Abstract

Accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment of cervicogenic headache is pertinent to many medical specialties including pain medicine and neurology. The diagnosis may be challenging given shared characteristics with other headache disorders such as migraine and occipital neuralgia. When confronted with a patient who suffers cervicogenic headache, the heterogeneity of available treatments can be perplexing to any provider. This chapter outlines how to initially approach a patient with headache, parsing a primary from secondary headache disorder given the absence or presence of alarming signs or symptoms. The epidemiology and pathophysiology of cervicogenic headache are then reviewed along with available treatments subject to scrutiny in the literature. Interventional and noninterventional treatment modalities including pharmacotherapy, nerve blockade, botulinum toxin treatment, radiofrequency ablation, and neuromodulation will be appraised based on the level of available evidence. Other overlapping pain syndromes such as myofascial pain and occipital neuralgia will also be discussed in an effort to demystify this phenomenon whose estimated annual prevalence is 4.1%.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Hospital, New York, NY, USA

    Adam Nassery

  2. Department of Anesthesiology, University of California, San Diego, Center for Pain Medicine, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Nathaniel M. Schuster

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  1. Adam Nassery
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  2. Nathaniel M. Schuster
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Correspondence to Adam Nassery .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Richard J. Kitz Professor of Anesthesia Research Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Jianren Mao

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Nassery, A., Schuster, N.M. (2020). Cervicogenic Headache. In: Mao, J. (eds) Spine Pain Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27447-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27447-4_15

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