Investigation of prevalence and clinical characteristics of migraine patients referred to the neurology department of Sina Hospital, 2010

Migraine as one of the most common types of headaches with high prevalence has significant impact on the lives of patients.This study estimated migraine prevalence and clinical characteristics of migraine patients in Hamadan. In this crossed- sectional study, all patients who referred to the neurology department of Sina Hospital from 2010.03. 21 to 2011.03.20 and confirmed by neurology specialists as migraine patients, were studied. Demographic data (age, sex, occupation), the scale migraine disability and clinical characteristics data were collected. The obtained information was analyzed by using SPSS 16 software descriptive statistics. During the study, 128 (12.8%) of the migraine patients referred to the neurology clinic. females constituted 68.7% of the patients. The average frequency of migraine attacks was 9.1 in a year. Pulse headache in 91 patients (85.1%) and one-sided headache in 79 patients (61.7%) were seen. Nausea and anorexia, respectively, the first (67.1%) and second (43.7%) had symptoms associated with migraine. Based on the obtained information from the mean MIDAS 53 (41.4%) of the patients with the average score of 23 showed severe performance degradation. Findings related to the severity of headache after that loss of work to reflect the importance of the social impact of migraine and the need for making strategies for migraine prevention and treatment are very important. In other words, more attention should be paid to initial prevention, diagnosis and treatment.