MedWire News: Frequent migraine headaches can significantly affect a sufferer's family life and ability to perform household tasks, study results show.

Despite this, the researchers found that many people who suffer from frequent migraine headaches do not receive migraine-specific medications.

Dr Marcelo Bigal, from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, USA, and team surveyed 520 people with chronic migraine, defined as 15 or more headache days per month over the past 3 months, and 9424 with less frequent migraines, called episodic migraine.

The researchers found that 37% of the participants with chronic migraine reported missing at least 5 days of family activities in past 3 months due to headaches, compared with just 10% of those with episodic migraine.

Furthermore, more than half of the participants with chronic migraine reported missing at least 5 days of household work in the past 3 months because of their condition, compared with just 24% of those with episodic migraine.

The researchers also found that, although most participants had previously discussed headache treatments with a health professional, just 32% of respondents with chronic migraine and 25% of those with episodic migraine were taking migraine-specific acute drugs to treat their condition, and just 33% of those with chronic migraine used preventative medications.

"We found that chronic migraine is a disabling form of primary headache, even more disabling than episodic migraine," Dr Bigal and team write in the journal Neurology.

They add: "Clinical trials that assess the effectiveness of current and in-development medications for the treatment of chronic migraine are urgently needed to provide patients and doctors with evidence-supported treatment options."