chronic migraine classification

Migraine or Chronic Migraine?

Have you heard the term chronic migraine? Do you wonder if you have chronic migraine? The term chronic does not refer to the severity of the migraine symptoms, but rather the number of migraine days in a given period of time.

Doctors categorize the frequency of migraine attacks into three categories- episodic, high frequency episodic, and chronic.
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These categories are based upon the number of headache days per month.
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Episodic migraine is classified as having 0-7 headache days/month. High frequency episodic is 8-14 days. Chronic migraine is 15 days or more, with a stipulation that at least 8 of these days must include migraine-specific features with the headache (think light/sound sensitivity, nausea, etc.)

chronic migraine

Reference:
Chalmer MA, Hansen TF, Lebedeva ER, Dodick DW, Lipton RB, Olesen J. Proposed new diagnostic criteria for chronic migraine [published online September 22, 2019]. Cephalalgia.

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