STUDY LINKS MIGRAINES AND POVERTY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 2, 1992                   TAG: 9201010099
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium
STUDY LINKS MIGRAINES AND POVERTY
Migraine headaches plague the poor more than the rich, disable men who get them as readily as women and cause four of five sufferers to miss school or work, according to the largest U.S. study of the malady.
"One big surprise is that migraines occurred at all income levels, but they occurred mostly at low-income levels," said Dr. Richard B. Lipton, co-author of a study that drew subjects from 9,507 U.S. households.
Poverty-related conditions - high stress, poor diet, less access to medical care - could trigger migraines, said Lipton, associate professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. But it also may be the other way around: that migraines cause poverty by undermining people's earning power, he said.
Migraines among the $10,000-or-less income group were 60 percent more common than among people in households making more than $30,000, said the study, published in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"If you look at [patients in] a doctor's office, it's a disease of the middle income and rich," Lipton said by telephone from New York, where he is also co-director of the Montefiore Medical Center Headache Unit.
"But if you look in the community, not in a doctor's office, you find it most common in households of income less than $10,000 a year," he said.
The findings, based on answers to a questionnaire mailed to 15,000 U.S. households in 1989, indicate that migraines are "extraordinarily common," afflicting 23 million Americans annually, Lipton said.
That includes 11.3 million who suffer moderate to severe disability, wrote the authors, led by Walter F. Stewart, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore.
A headache is a migraine if it has any two of four traits, Lipton said: pain on one side of the head; pulsing or throbbing pain; nausea or vomiting; and extreme sensitivity to light or sound. A migraine also must be recurring and not caused by any other physical condition. Untreated, migraines last four to 72 hours.
Also, any headache preceded by an aura - visual distortions, blurry vision, loss of vision, spots of light, zigzag lines - beginning 30 minutes to an hour before the headache, is by definition a migraine.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB