Skip to main content

One Health for Headache

Guest Editors:
Matilde Leonardi; Istituto Neurologico "Carlo Besta" - Fondazione IRCCS, Italy
Paolo Martelletti; Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 30 June 2024


BMC The Journal of Headache and Pain is calling for submissions to our Collection on One Health for Headache. This Collection aims to create a cross-disciplinary space for researchers, clinicians, academics, educators, patients’ organizations, and policy makers, working within and across clinical, social, and public health paradigms to address and reduce the burden of headache globally and reduce disability from this major non-communicable disease. We hope to bring together stakeholders who support the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, in particular Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that is “ensure healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages” and the following associated targets: reduce mortality, and morbidity, from non-communicable diseases; strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and achieve universal health coverage.

Image Credit Springer Nature

Meet the Guest Editors

Back to top

Matilde Leonardi; Istituto Neurologico "Carlo Besta" - Fondazione IRCCS, Italy

Matilde Leonardi, MD, PhD, is a neurologist and paediatrician. She is Director of Neurology in the Public Health, Disability Unit and Coma Research Centre at Carlo Besta Neurological Institute in Milan, Italy. She is a Fellow of the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) and a World Health Organization (WHO) expert and consultant on neurology, disability, ageing, and policy development who is co-chair of the WHO NeuroCOVID Forum group on essential neurological services for COVID-19 recoverers. Leonardi is also a World Federation of Neurorehabilitation (WFNR) Presidium Member. Leonardi has more than 280 scientific publications on related topics and was awarded the Italian excellence for research in 2019.
 

Paolo Martelletti; Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Paolo Martelletti, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Research at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. His research activity involved over time headaches and pain neuroimmunology, chronicisation, and rehabilitation protocols, management guidelines, public health issues, and education in headache disorders, as well as COVID-19 and vaccines issues in medicine. He has edited several books in the headache field and is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of BMC Springer Nature The Journal of Headache and Pain, and Springer Nature Comprehensive Clinical Medicine.

About the Collection

Worldwide there is an urgent need to face the increasing burden of chronic non communicable conditions affecting global health, by providing affordable, feasible, and sustainable public health responses. Primary headaches represent one of the most relevant global public health problems, affecting a total of 52% of the world's population, with tension-type headache afflicting 26% of the population, migraine 14%, and headache present for more than fifteen days a month 4.6%. The Global Burden of Diseases 2019 indicated that this pathology is the most prevalent among non-communicable diseases when analyzing women under 50. Importantly, each day, 15.8% of the world's population had a headache. Furthermore, the long-term booster effect of COVID-19 on headaches burden has yet to be quantified. If we add to this the share of secondary headaches, the overall picture of these pathologies on the population becomes untenable requiring coordinated and structured interventions between stakeholders such as, academies, scientific and patient associations, publishers, drug companies inspired by the policies and recommendations of international organizations (UN, WHO).

The goal for this Collection is to create a cross-disciplinary space for researchers, clinicians, academics, educators, patients’ organizations, and policy makers, working within and across clinical, social, and public health paradigms to address and reduce the burden of headache globally and reduce disability from this major non communicable disease. We hope to bring together stakeholders who support the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, in particular Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that is “ensure healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages” and the following associated targets: reduce mortality, and morbidity, from non-communicable diseases; strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and achieve universal health coverage.

Our aim is ambitious as we propose to the global community to rethink how to scale and implement actions using headache as a public health target to rethink policies towards SDG 3 by 2030.

We welcome scientific contributions reporting or discussing evidence-based strategies to:

- Reduce burden of primary headaches by reducing chronicity, barriers and impact on daily lives in a biopsychosocial perspective;

- Reduce medication overuse in acute management of primary headaches: strategies at primary, secondary, tertiary levels of care in a global perspective;

- Promote education of health care professionals in the management of primary headaches and define feasible methodology to support health-care facilities development to deliver comprehensive headache care pathways;

- Grant access to existing preventive and curative drugs for headaches in LMIC countries and facilitate the inclusion of these countries in research and development of new medicines (RCTs or RWS);

- Develop and implement training opportunities and education in low- and middle-income countries to improve the skills of health care professionals for management of headaches in primary and secondary care;

- Build a global alliance against headache disorders among headache lay and professional organizations as well as policy makers and relevant health and social authorities and stakeholders   to respond to public health needs in headache area.

Image Credit Springer Nature

  1. Headaches are frequent neurological disorders that are yet to be unveiled and treated comprehensively worldwide. Bearing in mind that the distribution of headache subtypes in neurology clinics (NC) is essentia...

    Authors: H. Genc, B. Baykan, H. Bolay, D. Uluduz, I. Unal-Cevik, N. Kissani, O. Luvsannorov, M. Togha, A. A. Ozdemir and A. Ozge
    Citation: The Journal of Headache and Pain 2023 24:24

Submission Guidelines

Back to top

This Collection welcomes several different types of journal manuscripts, e.g., research articles, consensus articles, reviews, and commentaries. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select One Health for Headache from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.