The dexamethasone suppression test in essential headache

After neuropsychological evaluation, we administered the dexamethasone suppression test to eleven patients suffering from muscle-contraction headache and to thirteen patients affected by migraine, in order to verify a possible correlation between a chronic pain such as headache and a cortisolemic response to dexamethasone. None of them appeared to be suffering from depressive syndrome; all patients were DST suppressors. These data suggest that the dexamethasone suppression test does not correlate with chronic pain, but with depression, consistent with the high specificity of this marker test for depression.