University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

— -- The Headache Center at the University of Pittsburgh has now become one of the busiest outpatient programs in the country. We're now seeing over one thousand patients per month among four neurologists and two physician assistants. We also have a research arm here run by one of our associates, and also full-time academic researchers that share our department or a division over at the VA.

The exciting programs we have now in place include numerous multi-center trials where we're investigating the latest and greatest potential medications to help migraine sufferers and also headache sufferers of other types. But also, we're actively involved with investigating the involvement of neck pain in migraine. The association of neck discomfort in migraine headache and in tension headache, and perhaps explaining why migraine gets misdiagnosed as tension headache, and why it gets treated like tension headache far too often. Our associates over at the VA are actively investigating the cellular aspects to migraine, the genetic underpinnings to migraine headaches, and then also, some of the cellular mechanisms that may make certain individuals more prone to migraine attacks.

So it's a very exciting time here at the University of Pittsburgh. We're trying to marry the best of the basic science approach with our colleagues over at the Veteran's Administration Hospital here. And then also the clinical approach, in which we have the valuable access to numerous patients and their difficulties in learning more about headaches of all types, especially migraine.