Headaches in Traumatic Brain Injury: Improvement Over Time, Associations With Quality of Life, and Impact of Migraine-Type Headaches.
Spencer Flynn, Brian Moore, Andre J van der Merwe and 4 others
PMID 35666575WHAT IT FOUND
Headaches in traumatic brain injury patients generally improved over five years, but those with mild TBI had more severe and frequent headaches than those with moderate or severe injuries.
Patients with migraine-type headaches reported worse quality of life, and those with moderate to severe headaches did not show significant improvement over time.
Key findings
01Patients with mild TBI had more severe and frequent headaches compared to those with moderate or severe TBI.
02Headache severity and frequency decreased over time in the overall cohort, but not in the subgroup with moderate or severe headaches.
03Migraine-type headaches were associated with lower scores on quality of life measures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study relied on a volunteer sample, which may have biased selection toward those with more severe symptoms. 20% of patients were lost to follow-up, and those lost were more likely to have mild TBI, potentially skewing recovery estimates. Pre-injury headache history was collected via self-report and medical records, which may have led to undercounting. The study could not classify headaches as strictly 'post-traumatic' under ICHD-3 criteria because data collection began at least 30 days post-injury. Advanced modeling of quality of life outcomes was limited by violations of statistical assumptions.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the NIH Intramural Research Program. No other conflicts of interest are reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that mild TBI patients have a milder headache burden. In this study, patients with mild TBI had more severe and frequent headaches than those with moderate or severe TBI, possibly because those who continued to have symptoms past one year were the ones who remained in the study or sought care.