Antoinette Maassen van den Brink - Gender and Migraine

The purpose of this Series, endorsed by the European Headache Federation (EHF), is to describe in detail all aspects of headache disorders that are of importance in primary care and the hospital setting, including pathophysiology, diagnosis, management, comorbidities, and issues in particular patient groups. A key feature of the Series is its multidisciplinary approach, and it will have wide appeal to internists, rheumatologists, neurologists, pain doctors, general practitioners, primary care givers, and pediatricians. Readers will find that the Series assists not only in understanding, recognizing, and treating the primary headache disorders, but also in identifying the potentially dangerous underlying causes of secondary headache disorders and avoiding mismanagement and overuse of medications for acute headache, which are major risk factors for disease aggravation. Each volume is designed to meet the needs of both more experienced professionals and medical students, residents, and trainees.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11801

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In the last 50 years, medicine has considered and studied patients regardless of gender, sociocultural, and environmental characteristics. Clinical trials are a typical example; experimental clinical studies composed mainly, especially in the phase II studies, voluntary samples of the male population. In migraine, this is not epidemiologically possible, but this reverses and comforts this disparity. The consequence is a reduced personalization and standardization of care measured on the male subject without taking into account variables such as gender, social status, education, culture, education, access to care, and the type of multiple therapies required for intercurrent comorbidity or transient diseases.

This so-called neutral approach of contemporary medicine is badly combined with a disease, migraine, which intersects the patients entire health life, whatever gender it belongs to or wishes to belong to.

We must therefore speak about gender-specific headache medicine, and this brilliant volume, edited by Antoinette Maassen van den Brink and Anne MacGregor, authoritative area scientists, will help experts to reshape clinical and research activity in the light of this not beyond derogable vision of primary headaches.

We are delighted to produce this book, dedicated to gender and migraine, endorsed by the European Headache Federation. Migraine is recognized to affect more women than men and is widely considered to be consequent to the effect of female sex hormones. Yet, despite this recognition, basic research still often uses male animal models, without a justification of the sex used. Further, clinical trials fail to analyze data from men and women separately. With increasing numbers of transgender men and women undergoing hormone therapy, we also need to consider how treatment will affect migraine. Moreover, a proper study of the effect of hormone treatment in such specific groups may shed more light on the mechanisms involved in the effects of sex hormones on the pathophysiology of migraine. In this book, we aim to address many of these issues and discuss opportunities for future research.

We are extremely grateful to each of the renowned authors involved in this project who are all experts in their fields. The authors present their personal opinions supported by evidence. Given the variations in drugs and doses worldwide, we urge readers to refer to their local formularies when considering the recommendations presented.

We also thank Angela Schulze-Thomin and Donatella Rizza at Springer, with particular thanks to the project coordinator, Madona Samuel.