Yes, Migraine Pain may be Worse than the Pain of Childbirth (and more migraine statistics)

Earlier this year, Eli Lilly and Company announced the results of a survey on the impact of migraine – appropriately called the Migraine Impact Report. The poll was conducted by The Nielsen Company, a well known data-gathering company in the USA.

So, let’s look at some of the data that they collected. Perhaps one of the most interesting is pain comparison.

So – you’ve experienced childbirth? Broken bones? Kidney stones? How did that compare to your migraine pain?

Now, a typical migraine attack was rated as 7.1 (out of 10) for pain. But what about your worst migraine attack?Remember, these are just averages from people who have experienced both migraine and the other type of pain.

The impact of the pain and of course other symptoms was the key part of this survey. Over the past month, migraine patients said that there had been almost a week when they couldn’t do what they wanted. That’s 84 days a year, or 2.5 to 3 months of the year!

Take a moment to think about the important events you’ve attended over the past year. Going to the kids’ play. A birthday party. A wedding. Now, cross out 7 or 8 of those events. That’s how many events the migraine patients said they had missed due to migraine attacks.

Now, of course migraine affects you at work. You’re concerned that you might miss that promotion, or simply not be as productive.

Now here’s an irony. 58% said “I worry that my coworkers think I’m faking or exaggerating when I have a migraine”. So, are there thousands of people out there exaggerating their pain at work? Well, 62% said,“I try to hide the true impact of my migraines from people at work or school”.

Hmmmmmm.

So actually, as other answers on the survey indicated, people without migraine actually underestimate how bad migraine is – and it’s partly because we (migraine patients) are generally trying not to make a big deal of it.

So no wonder most people with migraine said that their attacks make them feel “frustrated”. Interestingly, only a little over half said that the attacks usually made them feel “depressed”. (Depression is common in migraine, but not universal by any means.)

People who were not connected with people with migraine generally understood less about the disease – not a surprise. In fact, most were not aware that migraine is a neurological disease.

There is a lot more information in the survey – I encourage you to take a look. For a quick summery, there’s an infographic. Just click the image below:

If you want to go more in-depth, read Survey Reveals Many People with Migraine Live with Pain Nearly Half of Every Month, and then click on the blue Migraine Impact Report on the right side of the page.