1 Answers
Migrainous neuralgia: A distinctive syndrome of headaches, today better known as cluster headache. There are two main clinical patterns of cluster headache -- the episodic and the chronic:
The episodic and acute forms of cluster headache may transform into one another, so it seems most likely that they are merely different-appearing clinical patterns of one and the same disease.
Although the mechanisms underlying cluster headache and migraine may have a degree of commonality, cluster headache looks to be different and distinct as a disease from migraine. For example, propranolol is effective for migraine but not cluster headache while lithium benefits cluster headache syndrome but not migraine.
Cluster headache has also gone by a bevy of other confusing names including ciliary neuralgia, erythroprosopalgia, histamine cephalalgia, Raeder's syndrome, sphenopalatine neuralgia, and vidian neuralgia.