MIGRAINE AND STRESS - A DAILY EXAMINATION OF TEMPORAL RELATIONSHIPS IN WOMEN MIGRAINEURS

This study examined daily temporal relationships between stress, cogni tive appraisal, coping, and migraine in a group of young women migrain eurs sampled from a general population. Participants (N=20) meeting In ternational Headache Society(1) criteria for migraine with or migraine without aura provided headache activity, perceived stress, cognitive appraisal, and coping strategy data across 2 months of data collection . A time-series analytic approach was used to cross-correlate daily st ress, appraisal, and coping data with daily headache data controlling for factors that can inflate correlations in data collected across tim e. Analyses revealed that between 50% and 70% of subjects showed signi ficant, substantial, and meaningful temporal correlations between thei r daily stress and their daily migraine activity. Furthermore, these d ata support the hypothesis that stress and migraine am reciprocally re lated lie, cyclically influencing each other across time). In addition , despite some measurement concerns, our data suggest that cognitive a ppraisal and coping are also related to migraine activity in a recipro cal fashion.