A professional ballet dancer injured her back while arching into a hyperextension during a performance. Soon afterward, she developed a severe headache that got worse whenever she stood up. The cause was a leak in the membrane around her spinal cord that was letting cerebrospinal fluid escape.
Her case, reported by a team of rehabilitation, neurology, and neurosurgery physicians in Portugal in the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, describes spontaneous intracranial hypotension, a condition in which spinal fluid leaks and the brain loses some of the cushioning fluid around it. The report was published online in April 2025 and appears in the journal's June 2026 issue.
