Neurology Newsletter

Headache Program Bringing Relief to Widespread, Poorly Understood Problem vol.2, no.1 NEUROLOGY UCLA Neurology Newsletter ew medical disorders are as common, or cause as much disability, as headache. Hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide – including an estimated one in four women and one in 10 men – suffer from migraines. And yet, despite the staggering social and economic societal costs of migraine (hundreds of millions of days of disability and tens of billions of dollars in employer costs per

year), it remains poorly understood. Consequently, many patients are unable to control their headaches with current treatments. “Headache has been underappreciated as a basic science and clinical problem,” says Andrew Charles, M.D., professor in UCLA’s Department of Neurology. “When you consider its prevalence and the amount of suffering and disability it causes, funding for headache research has been trivial compared with funding to study other medical disorders.” Only a handful of programs in the country combine multidisciplinary research, training, and therapy in headache. One of those is the UCLA Headache Research and Treatment Program, under the direction of Dr. Charles. The program is dedicated to increasing the understanding of the molecular and cellular basis of headaches – including genetic, hormonal, and chemical influences – and applying that knowledge to optimizing treatment. Physicians and scientists are trained to have a better grasp of the basic and clinical aspects of headache, and new therapeutic approaches are being studied at the same time that a multidisciplinary team treats headache patients with both pharmaceutical and non- pharmaceutical strategies. The research effort is proceeding on several fronts. Genetics is believed to play an important role in some of the most common forms of headache, including...

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