ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the available knowledge about headaches and brain injury in a structured way. Clinicians and researchers have long been puzzled by patients presenting with enduring problems following brain injury. Literature on mild brain injury, post-concussion symptoms, and post traumatic headaches frequently reports the lack of symptom specificity, the controversies and complexities surrounding the existence of such problems, and the rarity of good studies helping to identify their causes and consequences. Individuals who have experienced a brain injury may develop one or several types of headache. The most common presentations, tension headache, migraine, cluster headache, and mixed post traumatic headache, are clinically similar to their non-traumatic counterparts. Tension headache may be chronic or episodic. Stress appears to be a highly related factor. The diagnosis and treatment of headaches after brain injury can be difficult as they involve subjective symptoms with unclear evidence of organic abnormality.
