More than 50% of people across the world have headache disorders

More than 50 percent of the people across the world have been afflicted with various types of headache disorders such as tension and recurrent headaches, according to a study by researchers from Norway.

The researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology reviewed 357 studies published between 1961 and the end of 2020, to find an estimate on the global prevalence of headaches.

The authors of the study found out that 52% of the global population has experienced a headache disorder within a given year. As many as 14% of these people reported a migraine, 26% reported a tension-type headache and 4.6% reported a headache for 15 or more days each month.

It further added that on a given day, 15.8% of the world's population have a headache and almost half of these people complained of a migraine. It basically implies that one in every seven people have a headache on any given day, wrote The Independent.

Females were found to have more headaches than males, and the study added that roughly twice as many women experience migraine and frequent headaches (15 or more headache days per month) as men.

The study, which has been published in The Journal of Headache and Pain, is an update to a paper released by the same team in 2007. It found that migraines have become more common in the last few years.

"Compared to our previous report and global estimates, the data does suggest that headaches and migraines rates may be increasing," said study author Lars Jacob Stovner.

"However, given that we could explain only 30% or less of the variation in headache estimates with the measures we looked at, it would be premature to conclude headaches are definitively increasing.

"What is clear is that overall, headache disorders are highly prevalent worldwide and can be a high burden," he added. The authors, however, made it clear that most of the publications analysed for the study came from high-income countries with good healthcare systems so the research may not reflect the situation of every county.