If you’re a human living on Earth, chances are that you’re no stranger to headaches. Between divisive politics, a global pandemic, and the general social media cacophony, there are plenty of stressors to set our temples throbbing. And new research suggests that chronic headaches affect a surprising swath of the planet's population. Nearly a third of humanity suffers from tension, migraine, or medication-related headache disorders, and has since 1990.
Affecting one in three people, headache disorders rank higher in frequency than diabetes (one in every nine people) and cancer (one in every five people).
An international team of more than 300 medical professionals recently analyzed the burden of headaches, and their work revealed the painfully pounding details. The findings, published this week in The Lancet Neurology and based on 33 years’ worth of data, show that headache prevalence is higher in women across all age groups, whether you’re talking about tension-type headaches or migraines.
The researchers used a massive trove of headache data collected from 1990 (the year before the World Wide Web was unleashed on the wider world) to 2023, encompassing 41,653 people from 18 countries. Given all the suspected environmental triggers for headaches—from alcohol and foods to exercise, sleep, posture, diet, nicotine, and stress—you’d think that headache prevalence would change with the times.
Not so, said study co-author Yvonne Xu, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in a statement. “Our analysis shows that headache disorders have remained unchanged in three decades.”
Read more: “When Other People’s Chewing Causes You Pain”
So, whichever factors make our heads hurt, they are at least consistent and persistent. Taking into account age and sex, the researchers developed a rubric to score the burden of headaches on individuals based on how long they lasted. Their measure of “headache disability” reflected the cumulative time spent in pain sufficient to affect daily activities. The scores for women proved twice as high as those of men, and women’s headaches occurred more often and were longer-lasting.
The real eye-opener in the findings, however, was that the escalation of many headaches to a level that caused disability could be linked to overdoing it on the pain medication. Looking across tension headaches and migraines, “medication-overuse” headaches (defined as secondary headaches occurring on at least 15 days per month) accounted for more than one-fifth of headache-related disabilities.
If the overuse of pain medications for primary headaches is bringing on more debilitating secondary headaches, the message is clear. “Our findings indicate that more than 20 percent of headache-attributed burden would be mitigated or completely averted if an important minority of people with headache did not overuse medication,” the study authors wrote.
They further recommended more effective and sensible interventions for headaches globally. “Improved coverage of effective headache medications (including preventive treatments) is needed,” they wrote, “but this must be done in tandem with education on the correct use of acute medications to avoid the increased burden associated with their overconsumption.”
Hopefully, humanity’s throbbing headache will start to subside if and when such measures are enacted. 
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Lead image: Vitalii Vodolazskyi / Shutterstock
