Types and impacts of headache on work and life among physicians

الملخص EN

Background: Headache is the one of the most frequent diagnoses in neurology outpatient clinics.

More than 90% of individuals experience headache from time to time in their life.

Most headaches occur in the daytime and affect nearly all aspects of life.

Family, friendships, daily living activities, exercise, diet, sleep and work productivity are all affected.

Aim: To determine types of headache and evaluate the degree of affected daily achievement of physicians suffering from headache.

Patients and Methods: full patient history record and neurological examination were applied.

The MIDAS (Migraine Disability Assessment) Questionnaire was used to assess disability in daily achievement at work and home caused by headache over the last three months.

MIDAS was applied on 207 female and male resident physicians suffering from headache.

All subjects are working at Suez Canal University and Ismailia general hospitals with different specialties.

Results: The results showed that 80.19%, 19.32% and 0.48% of the subjects are suffering from tension-type headache, migraine and cluster headache respectively.

Of all the subjects, 40.5% reported little or no disability, 14.01 % had Mild disability, 23.6% showed moderate disability, 21.7% reported severe disability.

There was strong positive correlation between disability grade, number of days with headache and specialties with marked stress.

Furthermore, negative association was recorded with increasing duration of working hours (R2 =0.90, p<0.05).

Conclusion: Tension-type headache is the most widespread type of headache followed by migraine.

There was a negative association between the number of years of work, and disability score.

On the contrary, there was a positive association between work shifts and specialties exposed to marked stress such as surgeons, ICU physicians and emergency doctors with increasing disability score.

Notably, the disability score increases exponentially with the increasing days of headache.