The prevalence and symptoms of migraine in a consecutive series of patients attending an optometric practice.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the investigation was to determine the prevalence of migraine in optometric practice and to document the variety of presentation. One thousand consecutively presenting patients of a suburban optometric practice were asked questions to establish whether they experience migraine or have experienced it in the past. Those with a history of migraine were asked further questions to establish the type of migraine and to document the variety of the symptoms they experienced. Eleven percent of male and 23% of female patients currently had migraine or had experienced it in the past. When corrected for the age distribution of the population of the state from which the sample was drawn, it is estimated that the general population prevalence of migraine is 9.5% for men and 19.7% for women. Half of the sample of migraineurs had not experienced a migraine within the last 12 months. A third had a known family history of migraine. Nearly half had not had a formal medical diagnosis of their migraine but only 7 had attended for optometric examination because of their migraine symptoms. Four of these patients had single migraine-like episodes and three had migraine equivalents (acephalic migraine, experiencing the visual aura without headache). Optometrists must be thoroughly familiar with migraine and its varied presentation because of its high prevalence, the explanatory value in offering a formal diagnosis of migraine, and the risk that headache or visual aura may be wrongly ascribed to migraine when there is some more sinister cause of the symptoms.