Traumatic Experiences, Stressful Events, and Alexithymia in Chronic Migraine With Medication Overuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Many factors are involved in the prognosis and outcome of Chronic Migraine and Medication Overuse Headache (CM+MOH), and their understanding is a topic of interest. It is well known that CM+MOH patients experience increased psychiatric comorbidity, such as anxiety, depression, or personality disorders. Other psychological factors still need to be explored. The present study is aimed to evaluate whether early life traumatic experiences, stressful life events, and alexithymia can be associated with CM+MOH. Methods: Three hundred and thirty-one individuals were recruited for this study. They belonged to one of the two following groups: CM+MOH (N=179; 79% females, Age: 45.2 ± 9.8) and episodic migraine (EM) (N=152; 81% females; Age: 40.7 ± 11.0). Diagnosis was operationally defined according to the International Classification of Headache Disorders 3rd edition (ICHD-IIIβ). Data on early life (physical and emotional) traumatic experiences, recent stressful events and alexithymia were collected by means of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, the Stressful life-events Questionnaire, and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) respectively. Results: Data showed a higher prevalence of emotional (χ² = 6.99; d.f. = 1; p = .006) and physical (χ² = 6.18; d.f. = 1; p = .009) childhood trauma and of current stressful events of important impact (χ² = 4.42; d.f. = 1; p = .025) in CM+MOH patients than in EM ones. CM+MOH patients were characterized by higher difficulties in a specific alexithymic trait (Factor 1 subscale of TAS-20) (F(1, 326) = 6.76, p = 0.01, ηp² = .02) when compared to the EM group. The role of these factors was confirmed in a multivariate analysis, which showed an association of CM+MOH with emotional (OR 2.655; 95% CI 1.153-6.115, p = .022) or physical trauma (OR 2.763; 95% CI 1.322-5.771, p = .007), and a high score at the Factor 1 (OR 1.039; 95% CI 1.002-1.078, p = .040). Conclusions: Our findings demonstrated a clear relationship between CM+MOH and life traumas, stressful events, and alexithymia. These observations have a relevant role in multiple fields of related to chronic headache: from the management to the nosographic framing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".