Health Utility In Chronic Migraine Sufferers: Assessing Quality Adjusted Life-Years

Chronic migraine is a common neurologic disorder posing a significant economic burden from absenteeism and medical treatments. Despite chronic migraine’s significant impact, no studies have directly aimed to survey these individuals to quantify their disease burden using validated health utility measures. Our study aims to quantify the significance of their disease burden. The survey utilizes the Standard Gamble (SG), Time Trade-Off (TTO), and Visual Analog Scale (VAS) measures to quantify the health utility states of those with chronic migraine to determine Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALY). Monocular and binocular blindness health utility scores were used as controls for the study. A total of 39 patients with migraine were included in this study. Patients who indicated that monocular blindness had worse health utility than binocular blindness were removed from the data as a screening control. A total of 29 patients passed the survey control screen. When comparing VAS, SG, and TTO utility scores for monocular blindness to chronic migraine, patients’ utility scores for chronic migraine were statistically significantly worse than those for monocular blindness by an average of 21.6% across all three utility scores (p ≤ 0.01). This study is the first to systematically survey patients with chronic migraine to present descriptive statistics that highlight the significant negative impact of chronic migraine on health utility.