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Updated: Jan 21, 2026

Controlled Cortical Impact Model for Traumatic Brain Injury
Published on: August 5, 2014
Migraine and traumatic brain injury: a cohort study in Taiwan
Qing-Rui Wang1, Ying-Yi Lu2,3,4, Ying-Ju Su5
1Department of Neurosurgery, Qinghe County Central Hospital of Hebei Province, Qinghe, Hebei, China.
Objective:
Traumatic brain injury is now a major contributor to the global healthcare burden. Migraine is another debilitating disease with a global health impact. While most researchers agree that traumatic brain injury is a risk factor for migraine, whether migraine is a risk factor for traumatic brain injury still remains under debate. We therefore aimed to investigate whether migraine was a risk factor for developing traumatic brain injury.
Study Design:
Retrospective population-based cohort study.
Setting:
Data for people who had been diagnosed with migraine were retrieved from Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database.
Participants:
We identified 7267 patients with newly diagnosed migraine during 1996-2010. The migraineurs to non-migraineurs ratio was set at 1:4 to enhance the power of statistical tests.
Primary And Secondary Outcome Measures:
We used multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression models to assess the effects of migraines on the risk of traumatic brain injury after adjusting for potential confounders.
Results:
The overall traumatic brain injury risk was 1.78 times greater in the migraine group compared with the non-migraine group after controlling for covariates. Additionally, patients with previous diagnoses of alcohol-attributed disease, mental disorders and diabetes mellitus had a significantly higher traumatic brain injury risk compared with those with no history of these diagnoses.
Conclusions:
This study of a population-based database indicated that migraine is a traumatic brain injury risk factor. Greater attention to migraine-targeted treatment modalities may reduce traumatic brain injury-related morbidity and mortality.
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