History of Migraine and Risk of COVID-19: A Cohort Study

Although studies have reported migraine and headache as common symptoms of COVID-19, little is known about the association between migraine and the risk of developing COVID-19.

This is a prospective cohort study among 16,492 women enrolled in the Women's Health Study who completed a series of questionnaires in 2020 and 2021 concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. We defined history of migraine as reporting a physician diagnosis of migraine on any of the annual questionnaires from enrollment into the study (1992-1995) through the end of 2019. Individuals were classified as having had COVID-19 if they reported a positive test for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or its antibodies, were told by a health care provider that they were probably or definitely diagnosed with COVID-19, or were hospitalized for COVID-19. We used logistic regression with inverse probability weighting to adjust for differences in the probability of being tested for SARS-CoV-2 and potential confounding.

There were 4759 women (28.9%) that reported any history of migraine through the end of 2019; 1271 women were classified as having COVID-19, including 394 cases among those with a history of migraine. We did not observe evidence of a strong or moderate association between history of migraine and the risk of having had COVID-19 (odds ratio 1.08; 95% confidence interval, 0.95-1.22). Similar results were observed for migraine subtypes as well as for hospitalizations for COVID-19.

Older women with a history of migraine do not have an appreciable increase in the risk of developing COVID-19.