IIf you are a person living on Earth, chances are you are no stranger to headaches. Between divisive politics, a global pandemic and the general cacophony of social media, there are plenty of stressors that make our temples throb. And new research shows that chronic headaches affect a surprising proportion of the world's population. Since 1990, nearly a third of humanity has suffered from tension, migraines or medication-related headaches.
Headache, which affects one in three people, ranks higher in frequency than diabetes (every ninth person) and Cancer (every fifth person).
An international team of more than 300 health professionals recently analyzed the burden of headaches, and their work revealed harrowing details. conclusionspublished this week in Lancet Neurology and, based on 33 years of data, show that headache prevalence is higher in women across all age groups, regardless of whether you're talking about tension-type headaches or migraines.
The researchers used a huge dataset of headache data collected from 1990 (the year before the World Wide Web became available to the world) to 2023, covering 41,653 people from 18 countries. Given all the environmental factors that have been suggested to cause headaches—from alcohol and food to exercise, sleep, posture, diet, nicotine, and stress—you would think that the prevalence of headaches would change over time.
Not so, study co-author Yvonne Xu, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said in her paper. statement. “Our analysis shows that headaches have not changed in three decades.”
Read more: “When Chewing Other People Hurts You»
So, no matter what factors give us headaches, they are at least consistent and persistent. Taking age and gender into account, the researchers developed a rubric to assess the burden of headaches in people based on how long they lasted. Their “headache disability” score reflected the cumulative time spent with pain sufficient to affect daily activities. Women's scores were twice as high as men's, and women's headaches occurred more frequently and lasted longer.
However, the real discovery was that the escalation of many headaches to disabling levels may be associated with an overdose of pain medications. When tension headaches and migraines are considered, headaches caused by “medication overuse” (defined as secondary headaches occurring on at least 15 days per month) account for more than one-fifth of headache-related disability.
If overuse of painkillers for primary headaches leads to even more debilitating secondary headaches, then the point is clear. “Our results suggest that more than 20 percent of the headache-related burden could be mitigated or completely prevented if a significant minority of people with headaches did not overuse medications,” the study authors wrote.
They also recommended more effective and smarter treatments for headaches around the world. “Improved coverage of effective headache medications (including preventative treatments) is needed,” they wrote, “but this should be done in conjunction with education on the proper use of acute medications to avoid increasing the burden associated with their overuse.”
Let's hope humanity's throbbing headache begins to subside if and when such measures are taken.
Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Main image: Vitaly Vodolazsky / Shutterstock
