Pain associated with herpes zoster arise from the virul neuritis of the suffered trigeminal or spinal dorsal ganglion. Prolonged neuritis makes an irreversible nerve injury and continuous pain impulse develops a central sensitization. A post-herpetic neuralgia is thought to be a neuropathic pain due to the irreversible nerve injury and sensitization. It is important to treat herpetic pain compl...

OBJECTIVE To report microvascular decompression as a possible effective treatment for patients with nervus intermedius neuralgia, and to contribute to the literature regarding both this syndrome and this specific form of treatment. METHOD Case report of a patient with intermedius neuralgia. The main complaint was severe otalgia in the area innervated by the nervus intermedius, possibly caused...

Occipital neuralgia is a form of headache that involves the posterior occiput in the greater or lesser occipital nerve distribution. Pain can be severe and persistent with conservative treatment. We present a case of intractable occipital neuralgia that conventional therapeutic modalities failed to ameliorate. We speculate that, in this case, the cause of headache could be the greater occipital...

Trigeminal neuralgia (TN), also known as tic douloureux is a chronic neuropathic pain disorder characterized by sporadic episodes of extreme, sudden burning or shock-like face pain that last from a few seconds to 2 minutes. Trigeminal neuralgia has a reported incidence of 5.9/100,000 women and 3.4/100,000 men in USA. The exact pathophysiology is still unclear, but demyelization leading to abnor...

Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is a common pain syndrome. The classic form (Type 1) is characterized by sudden onset of extreme, sporadic, burning or shock-like facial pain that is temporary or episodic [1]. The atypical form (Type 2), is characterized by constant aching, burning, stabbing pain of somewhat lower intensity than Type 1. The intensity of pain can be physically and mentally incapacitati...

INTRODUCTION Herpes zoster is a well-known reactivating viral disease that gives rise to painful skin lesions. Although this vesicular rash heals up within a few weeks, pain sometimes continues, becoming postherpetic neuralgia. In the case of those at high risk of developing postherpetic neuralgia, early interventional pain management is generally recommended as a preventive measure. Pain speci...

The prevalence of headache decreases with older age (Table 12-1) (1). Although 90% of headaches in younger patients are of the primary type, only 66% of those in the elderly are primary (2). There are numerous causes of new-onset headaches in those over 50 years of age (Table 12-2) (3). Although new-onset tension-type headaches are fairly common, migraine and clustertype headaches uncommonly be...

When I first joined Lord (then Dr) Walton's unit in September of 1962, I was immediately impressed not only by his unique expertise in muscle diseases, but also by his encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine, and his versatility. Not surprisingly this caused digressions which strayed from the myofibril; one such diversion took him and my colleague, John Balla, into the field of cluster headache or ...

The most common way to deal with a multiobjective optimization problem is to apply Pareto dominance relationship between solutions. The question is: how can we make a decision for a multiobjective problem if we cannot use the conventional Pareto dominance for ranking solutions? We will exemplify this by considering a multicriterion problem for a medical domain problem. Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN)...

OBJECTIVES The aim of present paper was to discuss issues related to trigeminal neuralgia with strong emphasis on the aetiology and pathogenesis of this problem. MATERIAL AND METHODS An electronic search of 5 databases (1965 - Oct 2012) and a hand search of peer-reviewed journals for relevant articles were performed. In addition, experience acquired from treating 3263 patients in the Departme...