The Board remands the claims for service connection for tension headaches and bilateral knee strains to ensure that the AOJ obtains an adequate medical opinion on secondary causation and direct service connection, respectively.
The deciding factor: The opinions provided by the VA examiners were found inadequate due to reliance on the absence of documentation or failure to consider lay statements regarding symptomatology.
- Claimed conditions
- tension headaches, bilateral knee strains
- How they argued it
- Not specified
- Exposure basis
- None
- Rating assigned
- None in this decision
- Decision date
- March 11, 2025
- Citation
- A25022539
What this means for you
A remand is not a loss. The Board sent the case back for more development — often a new exam or missing records — before making a final decision. Many remands later end in a grant, and the decision spells out exactly what the Board wanted to see.
What you can do next
Related decisions
Other Board decisions on a similar condition or argued the same way.
- Denied
The Board denied service connection for various conditions, including tension headaches, bilateral plantar fasciitis, and a bilateral hearing loss disability. The Board also denied an initial compensable rating for the Veteran's headache disability.
- Denied
The Board denied the Veteran's claim for an initial compensable rating for tension headaches, alternatively diagnosed as migraine headaches, finding that the evidence did not show characteristic prostrating attacks averaging one in 2 months over the last several months.
- Remanded (sent back)
The Board remands the matter for a retrospective medical assessment regarding the severity of the Veteran's headaches without medication to determine if an earlier effective date for a 50 percent disability rating is warranted.
- Denied
The Board denied the Veteran's claim for an initial compensable rating for tension headaches, as the evidence did not show characteristic prostrating attacks averaging one in two months over the last several months.
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