Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about headaches.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic, as always, you can follow along on the Zero to Finals website at zero definals.com in the neurology section or in the neurology section of the zero to finals medicine book.

So let's get straight into it.

Headaches are a very common presentation in general practice and all other areas of healthcare

and there's a large number of differential diagnosis that cause the headaches.

And in this section I'm going to be going through various different causes of headaches

and the individual features to help you distinguish between the types.

We'll also talk about some of the treatments for those headaches.

So first, let's talk about the differential diagnosis of a headache.

And there's loads of differentials. This can include tension headaches,

migraines, cluster headaches, secondary headaches, sinusitis, giant cell arteritis,

glaucoma, intracranial hemorrhage, subarachnoid hemorrhage, analgesic headache, hormonal headache,

cervical spondylosis or arthritis in the top of the spine, carbon monoxide poisoning,

trigeminal neuralgia, raised intracial pressure, brain tumours, meningitis and encephalitis. So that's a huge list of the different types of headaches,

and we'll go through some of those in more detail a bit later on. Let's talk about the red flags,

and it's important to consider the red flags for serious conditions, such as raised endocrineal

pressure or intracennial hemorrhage when you're

taking a history and managing a patient with a headache. This is because headaches are so common

and most headaches are completely benign, meaning they're not caused by something very serious,

but you need to be able to spot the headaches that are more serious.

The nice clinical knowledge summaries on headaches have a good summary on how to assess a headache,

so it's worth having a look at those.

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