Chronic paroxysmal hemicrania: a case report. Long-lasting remission in the chronic stage.

In a 38-year-old woman who had had CPH since the middle 1960s and had been successfully treated with indomethacin (dosage usually within the limits of 50-175 mg/day) for approximately 10 years, the requirement for indomethacin was gradually reduced to nought in the spring of 1985. She was then pain-free without indomethacin for almost 1 1/2 years. In the late fall of 1986 she had a 3-week exacerbation. In recent months, she again seems to have a slowly increasing, although clearly fluctuating, indomethacin requirement. Long-lasting remissions may thus appear even in the chronic stage. The remission could be a spontaneous one or it could in some way be related to the protracted indomethacin treatment; the authors favour the former possibility. The recurrence of symptoms after a while shows that the attack-generating potential has not been permanently extinguished by indomethacin.