Do accompanying symptoms in women with migraine allow distinction between two separate patient groups?

Abstract

We assessed the prevalence of a number of behavioral and somatic symptoms in women with migraine and investigated whether they were related to personality. In 46 women with migraine, record was taken of 26 symptoms, the MMPI and STAI questionnaires were administered and a psychological assessment was carried out with a semistructured interview using SCID, Italian version. Symptom data were processed through a self-organizing map (SOM) system and K-means cluster analysis. Since two patient clusters were obtained, data relative to headache characteristics aand the MMPI and STAI scores were assessed separately for each group. Group 2 had a significantly higher prevalence of several symptoms, of depressive disorders and higher MMPI and of STAI scores with respect to group 1, while the headache characteristics were substantially the same. It is concluded that a distinction can be made between two categories of female migraine patients with scarce or abundant accompanying symptoms. This difference does not seem related to the headache characteristics, but, rather, to the patients' personality and psychopathologic symptoms.