The role of life event stress, coping and social support in chronic headaches

A group of chronic headache sufferers (migraine and tension-type headache) was compared with two individually matched control groups of nonheadache subjects in terms of life event stress, and the stress moderating factors of coping skills and social support. The headache group did not differ from the control groups on the measures of life event stress or coping but significant differences arose on the measure of social support with the headache group achieving lower scores than the control groups. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that clinicians and researchers should pay more attention to social aspects of headaches, and that interventions aimed at teaching headache sufferers to mobilize social support should be considered as components of treatment packages.