Alternative therapies in the treatment of headache in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

In recent years, it has become common practice, in the treatment of headache, to use alternative methods, both alone and in association with drug therapies. Alternative therapies would appear to be more indicated in certain subjects: patients opposed to pharmacological treatments, those showing low tolerance of drugs or with a history of drug abuse, and those presenting medical contraindications or poor response to certain drugs. Numerous studies of alternative therapies have been published and here we review the literature data on the topic, considering in particular the accuracy of the various study methods in evaluating the effectiveness of the different therapies and their specificity for the different forms of headache.

Cerebral visual impairment in periventricular leukomalacia.

Infants with cerebral palsy (CP) frequently present cerebral visual impairment (CVI) often caused by damage to retrochiasmatic pathways. This is particularly true of subjects with damage to the periventricular white matter. Thirty-eight preterm infants with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) diagnosed by MRI were examined to correlate binocular visual acuity with neuroradiological findings.