Abstract
A brief Headache Symptom Questionnaire was administered to 129 chronic headache Sufferers. The questionnaire accurately classified 68.42% of headache subjects in their proper diagnostic category, comparable to, but statistically less accurate than, the 86.4% agreement between expert headache diagnosticians using clinical interviews. Results of a factor analysis of the Headache Symptom Questionnaire lend support for their being two commonly accepted global headache categories—vascular/migraine and muscle contraction—and one headache dimension concerned with duration of headache pain. Combined migraine-muscle contraction headache was found to be related more to migraine than to muscle contraction headache, and cluster headaches emerged as a separate clinical entity, not loading positively on any factor and loading negatively on all three.
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This research was supported in part by Grant NS-15235 from the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke.
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Arena, J.G., Blanchard, E.B., Andrasik, F. et al. The Headache Symptom Questionnaire: Discriminant classificatory ability and headache syndromes suggested by a factor analysis. Journal of Behavioral Assessment 4, 55–69 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01321382
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01321382