A study on migraines...via Twitter

It appears that twitter, a very popular social media website, has found a purpose in the research world.
According to the news website Newswise, researchers at the University of Michigan studied the tweets of migraine sufferers and others in an effort to understand the agony of migraine in real time. After scrutinizing 21,741 posts regarding those pesky headaches, some pretty interesting statistics emerged.

Migraine headaches are a fairly major public health problem; approximately 12 percent of the population in the Western world are migraine sufferers. Migraine headaches negatively affect a person's mood, quality of life, and productivity. Approximately 3 out of every 4 migraine sufferers report reduced functionality; thirty percent report that they require bed rest when suffering an attack.

Some additional findings:

About sixty-five percent of the tweets were actually from people experiencing a migraine attack posting in real time.

Migraine tweets were attributed to females 74% of the time, while males account for 17%.

Fifty-eight percent of migraine tweets originated from the USA; Europeans came in second place at twenty percent.

The higher global peak time for migraine tweets was observed on Mondays around 10 AM Eastern Standard Time. In the US these tweets reached a peak at 9 am and 8 pm on weekdays; morning tweets tended to peak later on weekends.

Migraine descriptors: most common was "worst" at around fifteen percent, and "massive" at eight percent.

About 44% of tweets reported that migraine attack affected mood most immediately.

You can read an abstract of this interesting study by clicking here.

Sources: Newswise, wikimedia, JMIR

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