The Prevalence of Migraine and Tension Type Headaches among Epileptic Patients

Background: Headache and epilepsy are two common chronic and recurrent disorders. Headache may be a premonitory or postdromic symptom of epileptic seizures. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the prevalence of migraine and tension type headache in epileptic patients. Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional descriptive study, 100 patients with epilepsy who referred to the neurology clinics, affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, in Southern Iran were enrolled this study since April to October 2013. Patients' demographic data and clinical characteristics of epilepsy and headache and temporal relationships between them were assessed. Mean&plusmn;standard deviation for non-quantitative data and Chi square test for quantitative data were used in SPSS software version 18. p<0.05 was considered as the level of significance. Results: Fifty-four patients (54%) have reported headache (15% migraine and 39% tension). The frequency of migraine, was higher in women than men (p=0.03). The patients with generalized epilepsy experienced more headaches than the patients with localization-related (focal) epilepsy (p=0.001). There was no statistically significant relationship between the prevalence of headache in the patients with controlled and uncontrolled epilepsies (p=0.45). Overall assessment showed that interictal headaches were more prevalent (42.53%), and post-ictal headaches were more prominent than the preictal ones (31.48% vs. 25.92%). Conclusion: In this study, headache was common in the epileptic patients. Consideration of these two common co-morbidities can be resulted in an appropriate drug selection for both epilepsy and headache.