E-Migraine: Development of a comprehensive tool to estimate Migraine Comorbidity Index Score

Abstract

e-Migraine is a validated tool to estimate the severity of headache based on Migraine Comorbidity Index (MigCI) that includes comorbidities of migraine, age, baseline duration of headache (hours) and baseline frequency of headache (day/month). The aim of this study is to introduce the prediction tool for physicians to calculate the MigCI score easily. Our study sample consisted of 2012 patients enrolled in the Turkish Headache Database examined by neurologists between 2000 and 2015. Comorbidities were modeled according to posterior probabilities obtained from Latent Class Analysis. The score ranges of the baseline duration and frequency of migraine were determined according to previous studies and histogram charts. Age groups were designated by the classification of World Health Organization. An index formula was created by using all these variables and total score was calculated. The range of MigCI score was 1.02 and 17.22. The median value with the 25th and 75th percentiles were 4.44[2.96-6.00]. The MCI introduced in this study is the first to estimate the headache score considering the posterior probabilities as weights. e-Migraine is a practical tool that may help physicians to detect the headache score and suggest a treatment or care to the patients according to the score.