diff --git a/lib/Cake/Network/CakeRequest.php b/lib/Cake/Network/CakeRequest.php
index d46dbce9c..a51a74c65 100644
--- a/lib/Cake/Network/CakeRequest.php
+++ b/lib/Cake/Network/CakeRequest.php
@@ -648,7 +648,7 @@ class CakeRequest implements ArrayAccess {
  */
 	public static function header($name) {
 		$name = 'HTTP_' . strtoupper(str_replace('-', '_', $name));
-		if (!empty($_SERVER[$name])) {
+		if (isset($_SERVER[$name])) {
 			return $_SERVER[$name];
 		}
 		return false;
diff --git a/lib/Cake/Test/Case/Network/CakeRequestTest.php b/lib/Cake/Test/Case/Network/CakeRequestTest.php
index 8216d5e2b..88bbbba6a 100644
--- a/lib/Cake/Test/Case/Network/CakeRequestTest.php
+++ b/lib/Cake/Test/Case/Network/CakeRequestTest.php
@@ -1069,12 +1069,14 @@ class CakeRequestTest extends CakeTestCase {
  * @return void
  */
 	public function testHeader() {
+		$_SERVER['HTTP_X_THING'] = '';
 		$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] = 'localhost';
 		$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-ca) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16';
 		$request = new CakeRequest('/', false);
 
 		$this->assertEquals($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], $request->header('host'));
 		$this->assertEquals($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $request->header('User-Agent'));
+		$this->assertSame('', $request->header('X-thing'));
 	}
 
 /**