The Stigma of Migraine
Abstract
BACKGROUND: People who have a disease often experience stigma, a socially and culturally embedded process through which individuals experience stereotyping, devaluation, and discrimination. Stigma has great impact on quality of life, behavior, and life chances. We do not know whether or not migraine is stigmatizing. METHODS: We studied 123 episodic migraine patients, 123 chronic migraine patients, and 62 epilepsy patients in a clinical setting to investigate the extent to which stigma attaches to migraine, using epilepsy as a comparison. We used the stigma scale for chronic illness, a 24-item questionnaire suitable for studying chronic neurologic diseases, and various disease impact measures. RESULTS: Patients with chronic migraine had higher scores (54.0±20.2) on the stigma scale for chronic illness than either episodic migraine (41.7±14.8) or epilepsy patients (44.6±16.3) (p<0.001). Subjects with migraine reported greater inability to work than epilepsy subjects. Stigma correlated most strongly with the mental component score of the short form of the medical outcomes health survey (SF-12), then with ability to work and migraine disability score for chronic and episodic migraine and the Liverpool impact on epilepsy scale for epilepsy. Analysis of covariance showed adjusted scores for the stigma scale for chronic illness were similar for chronic migraine (49.3; 95% confidence interval, 46.2 to 52.4) and epilepsy (46.5; 95% confidence interval, 41.6 to 51.6), and lower for…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Calcium Ions in the Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System
- AI-powered in silico twins: redefining precision medicine through simulation, personalization, and predictive healthcare
- In silico functional, structural and pathogenicity analysis of missense single nucleotide polymorphisms in human MCM6 gene
- In Silico drug repurposing pipeline using deep learning and structure based approaches in epilepsy
- Targeting serotonin receptors with phytochemicals – an in-silico study
- In silico exploration of anti-prostate cancer compounds from differential expressed genes
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.