Abstract

Background: Headache is the most ancient reported pain in humans. It has significant detrimental effect on the quality of life of the sufferers.Migraine is ranked as the eighth most burdensome disease and the seventh highest cause of disability in the world. India appears to have a very high prevalence of migraine, and of other headache disorders in line with global averages. The prevalence of common migraine among chronic headache patients attending ENT OPD in a tertiary care Centre, Kollam, Southern Kerala and to assess the trigger factors of common migraine was studied.
Material and Methods: It was a Prospective observational study conducted at Department of ENT, Government medical college, Kollam for One year. All patients with chronic headache fulfilling the inclusion and exclusion criteria, belonging to either sex between age group of 12 to 50 years coming to ENT opd were studied.The validated structured questionnaire enquired into several aspects of burden. Written informed consent from the patient was taken. Study was approved by Institutional Ethical Committee.
Results: The age-standardised 1-year prevalence of migraine was 25.2 %,  well above the global average of 14.7 %.¹The mean age of study participants was found to be 31.10±10 years. The most common position of headache was of one side of forehead seen in 50.6% patients followed by both sides forehead (10.4%). The most common type of headache in migraine was pricking in 58.5% patients followed by pulsatile type in 20.9% and Throbbing in 19.9% patients. But this was not significant (p>0.05). most of the patients had headache for 12-24 hours (87%). common causes were found to be travel (88.3%), smoking (98.3%), anger (88.9%), noise (77.5%), sleepless (65.5%), smell especially soap (75.9%), travel (88.3%) in hot climate.
Conclusion: In our study, the prevalence of migraine was high among patients which were in agreement with the findings of other studies. This may be due to their stress, duties and workload. Solutions should be considered since headaches reduce the quality of their work and have detrimental effects on their health.