VALIDITY OF THE INTERNATIONAL-HEADACHE-SOCIETY CRITERIA FOR MIGRAINE

For general practitioners and in epidemiological studies, migraine pos es diagnostic problems. It is a polymorphous disease, with diagnosis b ased on a subjective description of symptoms. The International Headac he Society (IHS) proposed a set of rigorous criteria for the diagnosis of migraine. We studied its validity on 171 outpatients of headache c linics and on 96 headache sufferers detected during an annual checkup for workers. The criteria showed an excellent specificity, however sen sitivity in both samples was < 50%. This lack of validity could be due to IHS criteria being too restrictive. We therefore elaborated and va lidated our own diagnostic tool, based on the IHS criteria, to a sensi tivity of 95% and a specificity of 7 8 %. We propose our tool for epid emiological studies.