Effectiveness of the massage and physical therapy program on tension type headache in PTSD patients

Background: Tension type headache is the most common type of primary headaches and common pain in PTSD patients. Tension type headache often are responsive to pharmacologic techniques such as acupuncture, massage, physical therapy and physiotherapy. There is no comprehensive researches that assess effects of these methods on tension type headache and all researches try physical therapy methods separately. Purpose: the aim of this study is meet the effects of a selective physical therapy regimen include postural and stabilizer muscles training of neck and head and a massage program on severity, duration, and frequency of tension type headache in people with explosion background. Method and materials: Twenty six patients with tension type headache choose from a neurology clinic and arrange into control and experimental group randomly. Both groups complete headache diary before and in treatment. We use Numeric analogue Scale (NAS) to evaluate pain intensity in diary. Massage and selective therapeutic exercise tried as intervention. For comparison between groups in weeks of research repeated measure of ANOVA test was used. The student`s t test for paired variables was employed to compare HIT-6 questionnaire scores. Results: results show that except of frequency of headaches (f1, 24=0.007, p=0.934) that have no significant different, intensity (f1, 24=84.61, p=0.001) and duration (f1, 24=36.011, p=0.001) had significant different between groups. Conclusion: in comparison with other research of physical therapy in treatment of tension headache, this research show effectiveness of a selective comprehensive program toward tries them separately.