Chronic daily headache: classification, stress and impact on the quality of life

Abstract

Chronic daily headache (CDH) is a heterogeneous group of headaches that occurs 15 or more days per month, lasting more than four hours, including those associated with medication overuse. The objectives of this study were: to classify CDH; to assess the quality of life and level of stress of the patients with this type of headache. A hundred patients, from both sexes, with minimum age of 18 years old were prospectively studied. The inclusion criterion was the presence of primary headache with more than 4-hour duration, a frequency of 15 days or more monthly, in the last three months. The diagnosis was according to the second edition of the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD-II) criteria. The SF-36 questionnaire to observe quality of life and Lipp´s Inventory of Stress Symptoms to diagnose stress were used. Patients with chronic organic disease were not included. The patients´ mean age was 38.8 years. The majority (87%) was women. CDH mean duration was 4.0 years. Applying the ICHD-II criteria, 17 different types of diagnosis were necessary to classify CDH of these patients. Among these types of diagnosis, 11 presented migraine (80% of the patients). The types with migraine had lower scores according to SF-36 either in physical function

Quality of life impairment, disability and economic burden associated with chronic daily headache, focusing on chronic migraine with or without medication overuse: A systematic review

“…Three out of the four studies suggested an inferior QoL for those patients Table 1. Studies of disability and productivity loss using MIDAS who had CDH with migraine or migrainous features compared to some other CDH subtypes (23,29,52). This was particularly pronounced in the D'Amico et al study (23) where all of the patients with migrainous features were also medication overusers.…”

“…Differences in domain scores for three studies are presented in Figure 1C [actual scores were not reported for the remaining study (29)]. Three out of the four studies suggested an inferior QoL for those patients Table 1.…”

“…The most widely used QoL instrument was the MOS 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey SF-36 (11 studies) (15,21,23,29,33,(41)(42)(43)45,47,52). The SF-12, an abbreviated version of the SF-36, was used in one study (37).…”

Correlation Between Life Events and Quality of Life in Patients with Medication-Overuse Headache

“…In the literature, studies assessing quality of life in patients with MOH are few. These studies report that quality of life is impaired in MOH patients (14,39,40). Guitera et al (41) determined impairment in all fields of quality of life and more significant impairment in physical functioning and body pain were observed in MOH patients compared with patients without MOH.…”

“…In the literature, number of studies that have studied quality of life in patients with MOH is quite limited. Comparing chronic daily headache patients with and without medication-overuse and have, quality of life was found to be lower in those with MOH (9,10,14,15). Studies revealed significant impairment in quality of life in all types of migraine compared with the healthy individuals and impairment was determined to be higher in patients with MOH.…”