RESUMEN
The course of disease and the predictive value of depression and anxiety in patients with migraine were prospectively examined. We recruited 393 migraineurs through articles in newspapers and performed a follow-up examination 30 months later. At baseline and follow-up, patients underwent a semistructured interview, filled out the Headache Impact Test (HIT-6), Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) and Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and they kept a headache diary for 30 days. One hundred and fifty-one patients (38.6%) were seen at follow-up. The baseline data of patients with and without follow-up were comparable. At follow-up the number of headache days per month had decreased from 9.6 +/- 5.8 to 8.1 +/- 6.3 (P < 0.001) and the proportion of patients with chronic headache (15.4%) and medication overuse (13%) had remained stable. SDS and SAS scores were associated with a high migraine frequency and high initial SDS scores predicted high migraine frequency at follow-up. This longitudinal study in unselected patients with migraine not excluding subjects with chronic headache, medication overuse, depression or anxiety does not point towards migraine as a progressive disease in the vast majority of patients and confirms the importance of psychiatric comorbidity.