The Key Facts Summarized
1. Headache disorders are real and often lifelong illnesses that impose pain and disability on people everywhere in the world:
- they are common throughout the world, affecting men, women and children;
- headache disorders are 3rd among world causes of disability;
- migraine alone is the cause of an estimated 400,000 lost work-days every year per million of the population in developed countries.
2. Effective treatments that would lessen these burdens are within reach:
- the five essential components of effective treatment are:
a) awareness of the problem;
b) correct diagnosis;
c) avoidance of mismanagement;
d) appropriate lifestyle modifications and
e) informed use of cost-effective drugs;
- in almost all cases, effective headache treatment requires no expensive equipment, tests or specialists.
3. The principal cause maintaining the burden of headache is failures in health systems, which do not provide existing effective treatments to people who need and would benefit from them:
- artificial barriers throughout the world prevent access to headache care;
- headache disorders are unrecognized as requiring health care or have low priority;
- mismanagement wastes resources and increases needs by making burdens worse:
- overuse of headache medication is the cause of daily headache in many adults and children.
4. The Global Campaign is a response to these failures. It aims to raise awareness of these burdens and the global public-health imperative they engender, and to devise and foster the implementation of health-care solutions to these burdens in countries worldwide.
5. In a world of scarce resources and competing priorities, the basis of the health-care solutions for headache in most parts of the world is education.