Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0037315 (sleep apnea)
 8,000 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

From this and the previous article, the following points may be offered in summary: When comparing the elderly age group with the general population, the incidence of migraine headaches decreases with age, whereas other etiologies such as glaucoma, temporal arteritis, and cerebrovascular disease may assume a more prominent role in the differential diagnosis. Patients in the geriatric population are frequently taking a multitude of medications, and it is extremely important to carefully evaluate these for possible precipitants of headache. Furthermore, in elderly patients with other potential medical problems, particular attention should be paid to the possibility of various systemic causes of headache. Therapy for specific headache disorders should be tailored to the individual patient. Consider the patient's overall general, psychological, medical, and neurologic background. The physician must be aware of possible interactions of medications with the therapeutic intervention, as well as possible poor tolerance to specific medications due to preexisting medical or neurologic disorders. A complete history, obtaining information on the temporal pattern of headache, the distribution of pain, and precipitating and alleviating factors, is extremely important in evaluating the elderly patient. A careful physical examination, paying particular attention to possible disorders of extracranial structures, is indicated. A neurologic exam, including basic tests of higher cortical function, should be obtained. Important additional laboratory investigations include a complete blood count, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, and basic blood chemistries. Arterial blood gases should be obtained in patients who have pulmonary disease, a history suggestive of sleep apnea, or other disorders that may produce hypoxia and hypercarbia, resulting in vascular headache.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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PMID:Headaches in older patients: Ddx and Tx of common nonvascular causes. 405 33

Approximately 10% of women and 5% of men at age 70 experience severe recurrent or constant headaches. Severe headache presenting for the first time in a patient over age 50 is unusual and requires a thorough medical and neurologic examination. Primary headache etiologies in older patients include migraine, tension-type, cluster, and the rare hypnic headache. For all of these, effective pain control includes pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic interventions. Secondary etiologies include temporal arteritis, medication-induced headache, cerebrovascular or cardiac ischemia, and intracranial hemorrhage or tumors. Head pain may also be cervicogenic or related to glaucoma or sleep apnea. In secondary cases, pain management is specific to treatment of the underlying structural or systemic disease.
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PMID:Geriatric headache. How to make the diagnosis and manage the pain. 1113 53

Chronic headache is still a frequent problem in old age, affecting about 10% of all women and 5% of all men older than 70 years. The incidence of primary headache decreases with advancing age, while that of secondary headache increases. The clinical characteristics of migraine can also change with age; for example, vegetative symptoms are less prominent, and less intense migrainous pain localized predominantly in the neck is frequently reported. Migraine aura can also be experienced more frequently in isolation, without a headache. Hypnic headache is a rare primary headache syndrome that occurs almost exclusively in the elderly. Most of the secondary headache syndromes that occur more frequently in old age present clinically as tension-type headache. Examples of rather common reasons for secondary headache syndromes in the elderly are intracranial space-occupying lesions, ophthalmological problems and autoimmune diseases such as giant cell arteritis. Elderly patients are especially likely to have a number of illnesses at any one time for which they take various medications each day, so that headaches can also quite often be caused by their medication or by withdrawal of these. As a result of such multimorbidity the homeostasis is disturbed in such patients, leading to various conditions that can entail concomitant headaches (sleep apnoea syndrome, dialysis headache, headache attributed to arterial hypertension or hypothyroidism). Familiar facial neuralgias, such as trigeminal neuralgia or postherpetic neuralgia following manifest herpes zoster affecting the face, become markedly more frequent with age. In general, in the treatment of headaches in the elderly it is essential to pay careful attention to potential interactions with the multiple drugs needed because of other diseases; in addition, the comorbidities themselves have to be taken into account, especially depression, anxiety and cognitive impairment, necessitating multimodal, interdisciplinary therapy plans.
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PMID:[Headache in the elderly]. 1822 47

Ischemic optic neuropathies are among the leading causes of severe visual acuity loss in people over 50 years of age. They constitute a set of various entities that are clinically, etiologically and therapeutically different. Anatomically, it is necessary to distinguish anterior and posterior forms. From an etiological point of view, the diagnosis of the arteritic form due to giant cell arteritis requires emergent management to prevent blindness and even death in the absence of prompt corticosteroid treatment. When this diagnosis has been ruled out with certainty, non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathies represent a vast etiological context that in the majority of cases involves a local predisposing factor (small optic nerves, disc drusen) with a precipitating factor (severe hypotension, general anesthesia or dialysis) in a context of vascular disease (sleep apnea syndrome, hypertension, diabetes, etc.). In the absence of specific available treatment, it is the responsibility of the clinician to identify the risk factors involved, in order to reduce the risk of contralateral recurrence that may occur even several years later. Due to their complexity, these pathologies are the subject of debates regarding both the pathophysiological and therapeutic perspectives; this review aims to provide a synthesis of validated knowledge while discussing controversial data.
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PMID:Acute ischemic optic nerve disease: Pathophysiology, clinical features and management. 3195 75

Ischemic optic neuropathies are among the leading causes of severe visual acuity loss in people over 50 years of age. They constitute a set of various entities that are clinically, etiologically and therapeutically different. Anatomically, it is necessary to distinguish anterior and posterior forms. From an etiological point of view, the diagnosis of the arteritic form due to giant cell arteritis requires emergent management to prevent blindness and even death in the absence of prompt corticosteroid treatment. When this diagnosis has been ruled out with certainty, non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathies represent a vast etiological context that in the majority of cases involves a local predisposing factor (small optic nerves, disc drusen) with a precipitating factor (severe hypotension, general anesthesia or dialysis) in a context of vascular disease (sleep apnea syndrome, hypertension, diabetes, etc.). In the absence of specific available treatment, it is the responsibility of the clinician to identify the risk factors involved, in order to reduce the risk of contralateral recurrence that may occur even several years later. Due to their complexity, these pathologies are the subject of debates regarding both the pathophysiological and therapeutic perspectives; this review aims to provide a synthesis of validated knowledge while discussing controversial data.
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PMID:[Acute ischemic optic nerve disease: Pathophysiology, clinical features and management (French translation of the article)]. 3205 27