FROM JOURNAL OF AFFECTIVE DISORDERS
About one-third of people with bipolar disorder are affected by comorbid migraine, and migraine is significantly more common among bipolar II disorder patients than among those with bipolar I disorder, a meta-analysis shows.
The metaanalysis covered 14 studies of 3,976 patients with some type of bipolar disorder from North America, Europe, and South America. Of the sample, 2,161 had bipolar I disorder and 647 had bipolar II disorder. The type of bipolar disorder the other patients had was either mixed or unknown. On average, each of the studies included 283.69 participants, and the mean age of a participant was 35.5 years. Studies that reported the prevalence of bipolar disorder among people with migraines were excluded.
Fifty-four of bipolar II disorder patients had migraines, compared with 32.7% of bipolar I disorder patients. An additional finding of the meta-analysis is that migraine was found significantly more often in studies that used standardized criteria to determine whether a bipolar patient had comorbid migraine than in studies that used nonstandardized criteria, such as self-report.
A meta-regression analysis of data from the studies showed that mean age moderated how frequently migraine occurred among the entire sample.
“The findings of this meta-analysis suggest that the prevalence of comorbid migraine among people with [bipolar disorder] is remarkably high, particularly among people with [bipolar II disorder],” according to Dr. Michele Fornaro and Brendon Stubbs.
The results of this meta-analysis “highlighted the need for further studies focusing on [migraine-bipolar II disorder] comobidity including well-matched control cases with or without rapid cycling features too,” according to the researchers.
Read the full study in Journal of Affective Disorders ( doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2015.02.032 ).
