Migraine and Tumarkin Crisis
In our series, a smaller proportion of patients in the group of patients
followed from the onset of the disease reported migraines relative to
the total group of patients with UMD. Thus, early care and a close
follow-up of the disease may be associated with a better management of
this type of headaches. Taking into account that approximately 12% of
the general population suffers from migraine (9), and 10 to 51% of
patients with MD (10–12), this may be underestimated in our sample. The
reason for this may be that we were not sufficiently cautious in
assessing the presence of migraine in the initial years of data
collection, as the migraine-MD relationship was not as relevant at that
time as it is at present. However, these would be non-differential
biases equally distributed throughout the sample and that would not lead
to an incorrect estimate of the associations but rather, to a reduction
in the existing estimates.
In our series 12,2% patients reported the presence of Tumarkin crises,
that is consistent with the published, 5-15% of patients (13–16).
Patients within model number 3 are those that experienced the highest
proportion of Tumarkin crises between episodes (17.7%), which augmented
the perceived severity of MD in these patients.