Guidelines for the management of headache in the emergency department

Abstract

Headache is a common problem in an emergency department. The main task of the emergency room (ER) doctor is to differentiate the primary forms from the secondary ones. Given that secondary headaches can manifest themselves in such a wide variety of ways, a differential diagnosis can then become extremely difficult. Guidelines can be found in the literature which help ER doctors with this task. Here we propose a procedure whereby four different clinical scenarios are defined for nontraumatic headache and then evidence-based suggestions are given for managing them in the emergency department.