La cefalea da digiuno: Una revisione della letteratura e nuove ipotesi

Headache is a common disorder in the general population. It is often highly debilitating for the people affected and highly costly to society. Although we know much about primary headaches, little is known yet about secondary headaches, which, however, are a frequent occurrence in the general population. A study conducted on the Danish general population found a lifetime prevalence rate of 22% for headache forms attributed to homeostasis disorders, including fasting headache. The purpose of this review was to analyse literature data on fasting headache, in order to evaluate its possible pathogenetic mechanisms and to suggest therapeutic strategies. We considered only articles in English published in scientific journals. We searched for these articles on Pubmed using "headache", "fasting", "Yom Kippur", "Ramadan", "hypoglycemia", and "caffeine deprivation" as key words, with no limitations for the year of publication. In most cases, fasting headache had the same clinical features as tension-type headache and the probability of onset increased directly with the length of fasting. Hypoglycemia and caffeine deprivation have been especially implicated as causative factors. However, much remains to be understood on this subject.