[Psychosomatic approach to patients with headache: alternative or integrated diagnoses?].

Each person has an inseparable body-mind unity, with psychic factors that can also manifest themselves through changes in the functions of the body, and with changing somatic states that contribute to mental experience. This explains why somatic symptoms fall within psychiatry. When a patient complains about physical symptoms, it is essentially an integrated, multidisciplinary diagnosis which is used to identify the various factors (biological and psychological) which worsen the disorder, and a psychiatric dimensional approach is used to integrate the descriptive symptomatic diagnosis with the psychostructural diagnosis.

Medication-overuse headache and personality: a controlled study by means of the MMPI-2.

Objective: The main aim of this study involves comparing the personality profiles of patients with medication-overuse headache (MOH) and episodic headaches, in order to elucidate the role of personality characteristics, according to one of the most widely used and validated personality assessment tool: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2).

Background: Many studies have assessed the personality of headache patients by means of MMPI-2 only using clinical and content scales. In this study the supplementary scales were also used as they evaluate different aspects of personality, particularly broad personality characteristics, generalized emotional distress and behavioral dyscontrol.