Stress is known to trigger headaches. Now it gets worse: Researchers have found that the more intense a person’s stress, the more time he or she will spend in pain.
The findings are based on data from the German Headache Consortium Study. Researchers interviewed 5,159 adults about their headache history and other health factors once every three months from 2010 to 2012. Among other things, volunteers were asked to rate the intensity of their stress on a 100-point scale.
Tension headaches — the most common type — were the most sensitive to stress, the researchers found. About 30 percent of people surveyed said they suffered tension headaches, which lasted for an average of 2.2 days per month. However, for every 10-point increase in stress intensity, the duration of these headaches increased by 6.3 percent. That worked out to an extra 3.3 hours per month.
Also, 14 percent of people in the study suffered from migraines, and they had them for 4.5 days per month, on average. These headaches were not quite as sensitive to stress — a 10-point bump in stress intensity was correlated with a 4.3 percent increase in migraine duration. However, since migraines lasted longer than tension headaches, that translated to 4.6 extra hours of migraine misery per month.
