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Migraine Progression: A Systematic Review

D. Buse, Jacob D. Greisman, Khosrow Baigi, R. Lipton

Headache, 2018

329 citations

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Migraine is a common and often debilitating neurological disease. It can be divided into episodic and chronic subforms based on the number of monthly headache days. Because only a subset of individuals with episodic migraine (EM) progress to chronic migraine (CM) over any given time period, understanding the factors that predict the new onset of CM or "migraine progression" may provide insights into the mechanisms, pathophysiology, prevention, and treatment of CM. In this review, we identify and summarize studies that report risk factors associated with the new onset of CM or related chronic headache diagnoses, group these risk factors and report the strength of evidence for the identified risk factors.

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a systematic review of studies that identify risk factors for the new onset of CM or related chronic headache diagnoses such as transformed migraine (TM) and chronic daily headache (CDH).

METHODS: Herein we summarize the findings of studies of risk factors associated with the new onset of CM/TM, CDH, or related diagnoses from the English language literature published before March 2018. The PubMed database was searched for relevant studies. Longitudinal studies with follow-up data and case-control studies were included in this qualitative synthesis. We report methodology, analytic criteria, and results for each manuscript and for the parent study. Next, we review the strength of evidence for each of the identified risk factors using a modified…

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