Do you suffer from a chronic headache disorder?
Headaches constitute one of the most significant scourges of mankind. Anyone who says, “It’s just a headache,” is one of the rare individuals who has never had a severe headache and does not know anyone who does.
More people complain of headache than any other ailment—some 45 million Americans each year, over 16% of the population. 23% of households contain at least one migraine sufferer. At one time or another in their lives more than 90% of the U.S. population will experience some kind of headache. More than eight million Americans visit their doctor for complaints of headache each year. Headache is the seventh most common reason for outpatient visits in the country.
By definition, acute headaches are those that occur uncommonly, usually less than once a week. Episodic headaches appear occasionally–less than 15 times per month, and chronic headaches occur more than 15 times per month or on a consistent basis over longer stretches of time.
An important distinction in the definition of headache is that of primary versus secondary.
- Primary headaches arise from the tissues on or in the head and are not caused by systemic illnesses or illness that spreads to the brain or other head structures from external sources.
- Secondary headache results from other health problems such as trauma, bleeding in the brain, tumors, meningitis, encephalitis, psychiatric disorder, and allergy.
The pain may be mild or severe, associated with neurological deficit or not, or the cause may or may not be outwardly apparent in either type; and the diagnosis of type of headache is not always clear. The description of several of the different types of headache will be presented further on in this blog post.
One interesting and perplexing fact about headaches is the greater prevalence among low-income sub-groups of the population. Emergency room visits are higher in rural areas and among patients in the lowest income quartile, where the rate of ER visits is more than twice as high in the poorest versus the wealthiest communities. On a statistical scale, migraine prevalence was inversely related to household income.
Headache disorders impose a considerable and easily recognizable burden on sufferers including substantial personal suffering, impaired quality of life and financial cost.The average cost for an inpatient hospital stay in the U.S. is $1,900 per day for headaches.
Repeated headache attacks, and often the constant fear of the next one, damage personal, family, and social life, and have a definite adverse effect on employment. Approximately 31% of sufferers had to miss at least one day of work or school in the previous three months; 51% report that work or school productivity was reduced by at least 50%.
In the U.S. the financial cost for headaches is: direct costs–annual treatment costs–over $1 billion per year; indirect costs–due to absenteeism and reduced effectiveness at work–$13 billion per year.
The long-term effort of coping with a chronic headache disorder is known to predispose the individual to other illnesses. For example, depression is three times more common in people with migraine or severe headaches than in healthy individuals. Considered the opposite way around, depression is a well-known cause of headache.
In the upcoming parts of this series of blog posts on headache, we will consider a more in-depth understanding of the different types of headaches, their causation, importance, and treatment.
Carl Douglass – Author
Carl Douglass Books
www.carldouglass.com
“Neurosurgeon Turned Author Writes With Gripping Realism”
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