Distribution of migraine attacks over the days of the week: Preliminary results from a web-based questionnaire

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this work is the analysis of migraine attack reports collected online within the project Migraine Radar in respect to the distribution of the migraine attacks over the week on a single-participant level.

Materials & methods: Recording data using a web app as well as smartphone apps made it possible to collect data of 44 639 migraine attacks of 1085 participants who reported seven or more attacks over a participation period of at least 90 days. This allows the investigation of attack distributions on a single-participant level. Considering the day of the week with the highest attack frequency for each participant-the mode of the individual distribution-allows identifying participants suffering from weekend migraines. Namely, a weekend pattern is assumed if the mode falls on a Saturday or Sunday.

Results: For 15.9% of the participants, the attacks were not distributed equally (P < 0.05) over the days of the week. Instead, participants show different individual patterns for the distribution of their migraine attacks. Furthermore, the modes of the individual distributions are not distributed equally over the week. In fact, Saturday seems to be the predominant day for migraine attacks for a greater proportion of participants (195 of 1085).

Conclusions: Concerning the individual attack distributions, we found that participants show individual attack patterns and weekend migraine can be determined for a subgroup of participants, while other participants show accumulations of their attacks on other days of the week.

Keywords: Migraine Radar; attack distribution; headache; migraine; temporal pattern.