Current Pain and Headache Reports

, Volume 14, Issue 6, pp 436–440 | Cite as

Tension-Type Headache and Women: Do Sex Hormones Influence Tension-Type Headache?

Article

Abstract

Most of the world’s population has suffered from a tension-type headache (TTH) at some point in their lives. The pathophysiology of this disease is not well understood, but TTH shares many features with migraine, leading to the belief that TTH and migraine may be on different ends of the same disease spectrum. There are many shared triggers between migraine and TTH, menstruation being one of them. Does menses being a trigger for TTH make TTH more like migraine, or does the role of sex hormones in TTH give us insight into the unique pathophysiology of this disease? This article will review TTH, concentrating on the role of sex hormones as a trigger for TTH.

Keywords

Tension-type headache Episodic tension-type headache Sex hormones 

Notes

Disclosures

No potential conflicts of interest related to this article were reported.

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Papers of particular interest, published recently, have been highlighted as: • Of importance •• Of major importance

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of NeurologyGeorgetown University HospitalWashingtonUSA

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