The Prevalence of Migraine and Tension Type Headaches among Epileptic Patients

Background: Headache and epilepsy are two common chronic and recurrentdisorders. Headache may be a premonitory or postdromic symptom of epilepticseizures.Objective: This study aims to evaluate the prevalence of migraine and tensiontype headache in epileptic patients.Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional descriptive study, 100 patientswith epilepsy who referred to the neurology clinics, affiliated to ShirazUniversity of Medical Sciences, in Southern Iran were enrolled this study sinceApril to October 2013. Patients demographic data and clinical characteristics ofepilepsy and headache and temporal relationships between them were assessed.Mean±standard deviation for non-quantitative data and Chi square test forquantitative data were used in SPSS software version 18. p<0.05 wasconsidered as the level of significance.Results: Fifty-four patients (54%) have reported headache (15% migraine and39% tension). The frequency of migraine, was higher in women than men(p=0.03). The patients with generalized epilepsy experienced more headachesthan the patients with localization-related (focal) epilepsy (p=0.001). There wasno statistically significant relationship between the prevalence of headache inthe patients with controlled and uncontrolled epilepsies (p=0.45). Overallassessment showed that interictal headaches were more prevalent (42.53%), andpost-ictal headaches were more prominent than the preictal ones (31.48% vs.25.92%).Conclusion: In this study, headache was common in the epileptic patients.Consideration of these two common co-morbidities can be resulted in anappropriate drug selection for both epilepsy and headache.

The Prevalence of Migraine and Tension Type Headaches among Epileptic Patients Keywords:

Epilepsy , Headache , Comorbidity