New investigations on the melancholic type personality structure in migraine patients

Abstract

In an earlier published study [16, 17, 18], it was demonstrated that migraine sufferers have personality traits significantly more strongly associated with the typus melancholicus than healthy individuals and patients with other mental and physical illnesses. They display a fixation on tidiness which manifests itself in an excessive striving for quality and quantity in performance-oriented situations. The main features of their social relationships are excessive helpfulness combined with an exaggerated tendency towards guilt avoidance and symbiotic attachment to their own families. They do not differ from unipolar depressives in these respects. The major aim of the new study is to examine whether the concept of the typus melancholicus in relation to migraine sufferers as proposed in the first study is adaptable to explaining the personality characteristics of migraine sufferers ("typus migraenicus"). Age-matched samples of 42 female migraine sufferers, 40 female patients with unipolar depression, and 41 female control subjects took part in the new study. The test instruments used were von Zerssen's Munich Personality Test (MPT) and a questionnaire specially designed by the first author for assessing the typus migraenicus (German "Fragebogen zur Erfassung des Typus migraenicus," or FETM). The results obtained using univariate and multivariate analyses demonstrate a confirmation of the typus migraenicus concept, although to a less pronounced degree than the previous study. This can be seen as supporting evidence that, independently of the study sample and the investigators, migraine sufferers display with higher random frequency a personality profile very similar to the premorbid personality structure in unipolar depressives.