Migraine & Headache Awareness Month: New insights from a recent study

It’s National Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, so let’s help spread that awareness by sharing the results of a recent survey that 300 members from the migraine community on PatientsLikeMe took.

For this study, we defined chronic migraine as having had 15 or more headaches in the past month. Here’s what members helped uncover:

High level takeaways:

Some of these high level results might seem obvious, but we first wanted to set a baseline for what the community was experiencing.

  • The more they experience migraines, the more types of symptoms they report and the worse those symptoms are.
  • Also the more they experience migraines, the worse their overall quality of life becomes for things like their ability to be active and their emotional experiences.  
  • Those who experience chronic migraines more often report also living with anxiety disorders.

Symptoms takeaways:

Not surprisingly, you’d expect that if a person is living with migraines, some of the symptoms they’d report would be headaches, nausea and light sensitivity. But what they also shared is that their experiences go beyond these typical symptoms to include:

  • Pain: back pain, muscle and joint pain, muscle spasms
  • Mental: brain fog, problems concentrating, dizziness
  • Fatigue: sleepiness, insomnia, fatigue, exhaustion

Treatment takeaways:

We also wanted to learn more about the treatment types this community is taking to treat migraines and how burdensome they are. Here’s what they shared:

  • Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) (e.g. Ibuprofen, Naproxen) and Antimigraine (e.g. sumatriptan, zolmitriptan) are the most reported types of treatments.
  • Most patients report taking their treatment as prescribed with few issues.

 

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