BACKGROUND: Identifying factors related to migraine onset is essential to effective treatment because it would allow patients to take prophylactic measures to reduce the likelihood of migraine occurrence. The experience of intense emotions is a potential factor affecting migraine onset. This study aimed to explore the relationship between day-to-day experience of emotions (specifically the intensity of sadness, happiness, anxiety/stress, and interpersonal stress) and migraine onset.
METHODS: Thirty adult women with episodic migraine were recruited to engage in a 12-week monitoring period that involved wearing a Fitbit and answering daily questionnaires by mobile app. The daily questionnaires asked about headache occurrence and triggers, emotional intensity, and sleep. A series of linear regressions were carried out to understand the overall relationship between emotional intensity and the onset of migraine over the 12-week period. In addition, mixed effects models were used to explore the temporal relationship between participants’ reported emotional intensity on a given day and migraine occurrence the next day.
RESULTS: The linear regressions for migraine occurrence and headache occurrence as a function of emotional intensity were not significant. However, mixed effects models showed that emotion intensity and migraine onset were significantly associated for happiness (estimate = -0.081; p = .027), anxiety/stress (estimate = 0.060; p = .040), and interpersonal stress (estimate = 0.12; p = .0017) but not sadness (estimate = 0.025; p = .46).
CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that high levels of anxiety/stress and interpersonal stress predict onset of migraine the next day. Similarly, low levels of happiness predict onset of migraine the next day. However, these relationships are no longer significant when emotional intensity is averaged over the 12-week monitoring period. Taken together, these findings support the need for longitudinal research evaluating the temporal relationship between emotion and migraine occurrence, particularly because important relationships may be lost with cross-sectional studies. Furthermore, these findings point to the potential role of strong negative emotions and the absence of positive emotions in producing migraine.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48265 |
| Date | 27 February 2024 |
| Creators | Hurley, Catherine |
| Contributors | Spencer, Jean L., Lipschitz, Jessica |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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