Abstract

Clinical data and experience to date have demonstrated that botulinum toxin is an effective and well-tolerated therapy for several headaches, especially chronic migraine(CM). CM is a severely disabling condition and has been showed to significantly reduce patients’ quality of life. Current treatment of CM may be complicated by the frequent use of acute headache pain medications such as analgesics, triptans, or ergots. Botulinum toxin reduced headache and migraine days and frequency of moderate to severe headache days with botulinum toxin, which in turn reduced the burden of illness in patients with disabling CM. Further investigations will define the accurate pathophysiologic mechanisms of botulinum toxin in the headache management. Further studies are needed in order to compare the efficacy of botulinum toxin with other prophylactic drugs.