A recent bad experience with doctors has convinced me that there is, in fact, a link between headaches and low cortisol. When my 7 yr. old, non-saltwasting son switched doctors in February, his medication was also switched. After three months on the new medication, he became more and more unpredictable and violent, and started complaining regularly of headaches that started at the base of his neck. ( I was struck by the similarity in his description of what was ailing him to those of adult CAH patients, like Susan A., and parents of older CAH children, who can perhaps better speak for themselves.) In May, we discovered that the new doctor had, in fact, made a calculation error when she switched his medication in February. A wrong conversion factor had been used when he was switched from dexamethasone to cortef pills and, for three months, he was getting only HALF the doseage of cortisone that he should have been receiving. We ended up switching doctors again, when this was inadvertently discovered (the doctor never admitted the mistake, by the way)and after correcting the medication, my son's problems went away, almost overnight. My son was diagnosed only in December, and he had never had these problems prior to the time he was on the erroneous cortef doseage. It has been 6 weeeks since his medication has been changed, and he has not had the same problems since. It was the fact that his behavior changed so drastically and irrationally over time, that I initially started suspecting a medication error. And when his problems started becoming physical, as well---headaches, neckaches, dizziness---I started becoming even more concerned. The last day my son was on the cortef, he was sent home from school, not feeling well. The nurse called to say that he appeared tired and flushed, and had been complaining of a neckache and headache, though he had no temperature and they couldn't tell what was wrong with him. The school principal, classroom teacher, and another parent who was helping in the class that day, later all verified that they saw him that day, and he did not look good. When he came home early around noon, he was unenergetic, miserable, and weepy, and ended up regressing into a horrible tantrum. I ended up giving him an extra cortef pill, and by later that afternoon, he was back to his old self. On a previous occasion, as well, because I had starting suspecting low cortisol, rather than psychological causes (as I'd first thought) as the cause of my son's problems, I also experimented with giving him an extra cortef pill in the middle of the day. (The doctor had prescribed only two per day for him---once in the morning, and once at night.) The change in him that day, compared to the previous few months, was dramatic. The following day, a Monday, he actually begged me to come to school in the middle of the day to give him an additional pill, because it made him feel so much better! As parents, I'm sure you all know how unusual it is for ANY child to, on their own, ask for MORE, rather than, less medication. In early May, as I got increasingly frustrated and concerned by the sharp downward spiral my son was experiencing, just before we discovered this medication error, I tape-recorded a couple of his last bad "episodes." (I was actually planning to play them for the doctor so she would believe what I was saying, but I never got the chance.) When I listen to them now, sometimes just to remind myself that I wasn't imagining or making all this up, now that it is past history, I can hear how desperate and edgy my son's voice was and how he did not sound at all like himself. In one of the tape recordings, in the middle of an emotional tirade, he can be heard screaming that he was getting a headache and a neckache again, and why did I tell him last time that it was going to get better when it was happening to him again? For me now, there is absolutely no doubt, at least in my son's case, of the link between low cortisol and these other issues.