Half of world's adults suffer from headaches
Almost half of all adults worldwide suffer from headache disorders
such as migraines and tension headaches and the problem has huge
economic and societal costs, the World Health Organisation said on
Tuesday. Yet headaches are widely under-recognised, under-diagnosed and
under-treated, and the scant knowledge about them and the burdens they
impose must be improved, the WHO said.
Publishing its first global atlas on headaches, the Geneva-based
United Nations health body said it found that 47 percent of all adults
have a headache disorder and "the financial costs to society through
lost productivity are enormous".
In the European Union (EU) alone, 190 million days are lost from work
every year because of migraine, it said.
"Headache and migraine disorders are greatly underrated and
underreported by health systems and receive too little attention," Dr
Shekhar Saxena, the WHO's director of mental health and substance abuse
disorders, said in an emailed statement about the report. "Headaches can
be debilitating for many people, rendering them unable to work. During
migraine attacks, 90 percent of people postpone household chores, almost
three-quarters have limited ability to work and half of them miss work
entirely." Migraine affects around one in six women and one in 12 men,
and has been estimated to be the most expensive brain disorder to
society in the EU and the United States.
The WHO report found that most importantly, headache disorders are
very disabling: Worldwide, migraine alone is the cause of 1.3 percent of
all disability due to illness, it said, and experts estimate that taken
together, all headache disorders account for double this burden.
Migraine alone is the cause of an estimated 400,000 lost days from work
or school every year per million of the population in developed
countries, and in the EU, the total annual cost of all headache has
recently been estimated at 155 billion euros ($229 billion).
"Governments must take the issue more seriously, train health
personnel in headache disorder diagnosis and treatment, and ensure
appropriate medication is available and used properly," Saxena said.
An international scientific team said last year it had for the first
time identified a genetic risk factor linked with common migraines a
finding that could open the way for new treatments to prevent migraine
attacks. Reuters |