Raimondas Kiltinavičius¹, Greta Venckutė ¹, Paulius Ješkevičius¹

¹ Faculty of Medicine, Medical Academy, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania

Abstract

Acute headaches are one of the main reasons why patients seek primary health care or emergency care. For this reason, medical practitioners in various fields have to face with patients suffering from headaches. Dangerous headaches, which can be an expression of a serious illness must be very well recognized and diagnosed as quickly as possible to start an adequate treatment. A whole large number of patients comes with primary headaches, the intensity and accompanying symptoms of which can vary greatly. Comprehensive collection of patient history and detailing of clinical symptoms in differential diagnosis becomes the most important aspect, as the diagnosis of primary headache is based only on clinical manifestations. Constant pain can be very severe, and affect person’s daily life or even cause mental damage. Being able to make a right diagnosis  gives us opportunity to administer medicational and non-medicational treatment without much difficulty and prevent deterioration in patients ’quality of life, as well as a risk of reccurence of primary headaches.

Keywords: acute headache, migraine, tension type headache.