Thirty years of headache research in Italy

Over the last few decades, worldwide headache research has made very significant progress. Italy has played a prominent role in this research experience, through several groups of investigators that have regularly been conducting basically independent high-profile studies. A review of the headache literature in the last few decades shows that Italy, which has traditionally been among the countries at the frontline of headache research-nearly 10% of all the articles published in 1984 in Headache and Cephalalgia concerned studies conducted by Italian headache centres-is now second only to the United States. As many as 33 of the 243 articles published in the two journals in 2004 were from Italian research groups, accounting for 13.6% of the total. The next goal is to raise Italian headache research to increasingly higher scientific levels by capitalising on the skills and enthusiasm of young researchers.