Department of Psychiatry, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Hong Kong Mood Disorders Center, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative, Washington, USA
Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction, Utrecht, The Netherlands
National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico
Sant Joan de Deu-SSM, Barcelona, Spain
Center for Public Mental Health, Austria
Department of Neurosciences and Psychiatry, University Hospitals Gasthuisberg, Belgium
Regional Health Care Agency, Emilia-Romagna Region, Bologna, Italy
Hôpitaux de Paris, Paris, France, Mission Performance et Prospective Médicales (Direction de la Politique Médicale, AP-HP), France
National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca University, Colombia
National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan
Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence: Professor Sing Lee, Director, Hong Kong Mood Disorders Center, 7A, Block E, Staff Quarters, Prince of Wales Hospital, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong. Email: singlee{at}cuhk.edu.hk
None. Funding detailed in Acknowledgements.
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Community studies about the association of headache with both childhood family adversities and depression/anxiety disorders are limited.
Aims
To assess the independent and joint associations of childhood family adversities and early-onset depression and anxiety disorders with risks of adult-onset headache.
Method
Data were pooled from cross-sectional community surveys conducted in ten Latin and North American, European and Asian countries (n=18 303) by using standardised instruments. Headache and a range of childhood family adversities were assessed by self-report.
Results
The number of childhood family adversities was associated with adult-onset headache after adjusting for gender, age, country and early-onset depression/anxiety disorder status (for one adversity, hazard ratio (HR)=1.22–1.6; for two adversities, HR=1.19–1.67; for three or more adversities, HR=1.37–1.95). Early and current onset of depression/anxiety disorders were independently associated (HR=1.42–1.89) with adult-onset headache after controlling for number of childhood family adversities.
Conclusions
The findings call for a broad developmental perspective concerning risk factors for development of headache.
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Recent studies have found that adverse childhood events may play a role in the association between headache and mental disorders among adults.4,5 However, most of these studies involved clinical rather than representative community samples. They also focused on depression rather than anxiety disorders and usually assessed mental disorder status by self-rated scales rather than standardised diagnostic interview.6,7 Moreover, although mental disorders and childhood family adversities are prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, most research has been conducted in high-income countries.4,5
The present study assesses the independent and joint effects of significant childhood family adversities and early-onset depression and anxiety disorders in influencing risks of developing adult-onset headache. This assessment is based on cross-national data pooled from community-based surveys conducted in 10 countries that participated in the World Mental Health Survey Consortium (www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/wmh).
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Internal subsampling was used to reduce respondent burden and cost by dividing the interview into two parts. Part 1 included the core diagnostic assessment of mental disorders. Part 2 included additional information relevant to a wide range of survey objectives, including assessment of chronic physical conditions and childhood family adversities. All respondents completed part 1. All part 1 respondents who met criteria for any mental disorder and a probability sample of other respondents were administered part 2. Part 2 respondents were weighted by the inverse of their probability of selection for part 2 of the interview to adjust for differential sampling. Analyses in this paper were based on the weighted part 2 subsample (n=18 303). Additional weights were used to adjust for differential probabilities of selection within households, adjust for non-response, and match the samples to population socio-demographic distributions.
Mental disorder status
All surveys used the World Mental Health (WMH) Survey version of the World
Health Organization's Composite International Diagnostic Interview
(WHO–CIDI)8
(WMH–CIDI; current version, CIDI 3.0), a fully structured diagnostic
interview, to assess disorders and treatment. Methodological evidence
collected in the WHO–CIDI field trials and later clinical calibration
studies showed that all the disorders considered herein were assessed with
acceptable reliability and validity in the original
CIDI,9 and the
WMH–CIDI.10
Disorders were assessed using the definitions and criteria of the
DSM–IV.11
Composite International Diagnostic Interview organic exclusion rules were
imposed (i.e. the diagnosis was not made if the respondent indicated that the
episode of depression or anxiety symptoms was due to physical illness or
injury or use of medication, drugs or alcohol).
This paper includes anxiety disorders (generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and/or agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder and social phobia) and major depressive episode, which occurred in the previous 12 months and before age 21 years. Depression and anxiety disorders were aggregated into a single category, on the basis of prior findings from the WMH surveys that anxiety disorders and major depression have independent associations of a comparable magnitude with headache and with other chronic physical conditions.7
Headache
Severe headache was ascertained as part of a chronic physical disorder
checklist, of the kind commonly used in national health
surveys.12
Respondents were asked whether they had ever had frequent or severe headache
in the previous 12 months. Prior research has demonstrated reasonable
correspondence between self-reported chronic conditions (e.g. diabetes, heart
disease and headache) and records of general
practitioners,13
but lifetime history of severe headache is subject to recall bias. Although we
assessed whether recall bias associated with current depression or anxiety
disorder influenced the association of childhood family adversities with adult
onset of frequent or severe headaches, the problem of retrospective recall may
admittedly remain.
Childhood family adversities
The following kinds of childhood family adversities were included in the
present study: physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, parental death, parental
divorce, other parental loss, parental mental disorder, parental substance
misuse, parental criminal behaviour, family violence and family economic
adversity. Those respondents who met the criteria specified for a given
adversity before the age of 18 years were coded as having experienced
childhood family adversity (online Appendix DS1).
Training and field procedures
Experienced CIDI trainers in the USA trained bilingual supervisors in each
country. The WHO translation protocol was used to translate instruments and
training materials. Some surveys were carried out in bilingual form (Belgium).
Other surveys were carried out exclusively in the country's official language.
Persons who could not speak these languages were excluded. Quality control
protocols, described in more detail
elsewhere,14 were
standardised across countries to check on interviewer accuracy and to specify
data cleaning and coding procedures. The institutional review board of the
organisation that coordinated the survey in each country approved and
monitored compliance with procedures for obtaining informed consent and
protecting participants.
Statistical analysis
The association of childhood family adversities and early-onset mental
disorders with adult-onset frequent or severe headache was studied with
discrete-time survival analyses, using retrospectively reported age at onset
of headache (reported in whole years). The start of the period at risk of
adult-onset headache was set at age 21 years. Persons who reported that
frequent or severe headache developed before age 21 were excluded.
Cox proportional hazards models were constructed to estimate risk of adult-onset headache as a function of number and type of childhood family adversities and early-onset depression/anxiety disorder status while adjusting for potential confounders (gender, current age and smoking). Country was included in the analyses as a stratifying variable, which allowed each country to have a unique hazard function. This was necessary because of large differences in prevalence rates of childhood family adversities, mental disorders and chronic physical disorders between countries, and to allow for the slight differences in measurement of childhood family adversities among countries (e.g. data from European countries did not include childhood neglect or parental divorce).
In the Cox proportional hazard regression analyses, time to age at onset of headache from age 20 was the dependent variable. Persons who had not developed headache were censored at their current age. The associations are expressed as hazard ratios measuring relative risk. Childhood family adversities were analysed in four categories of number of adversities (none, 1, 2, 3+), with no adversities as the reference group. Childhood family adversities and early-onset mental disorders were included in the models both separately and simultaneously.
To account for the possibility of differential recall of childhood family adversities among those with a current depressive or anxiety disorder, we performed an additional analysis that adjusted for current (12-month) depression or anxiety disorder. We also performed an additional analysis adjusting for educational attainment. Because the inclusion of education in the models made virtually no difference in results, we report results unadjusted for education (detailed information on education was not collected in France, so to have reported all results adjusted for education would also have meant excluding France from analysis). We screened for interaction of childhood family adversities with early-onset depression/anxiety disorder in predicting headache onset, but the interaction was non-significant so only main effects are reported in this paper.
Ninety-five per cent confidence intervals were calculated for all hazard ratios. Statistical significance level was set at 0.05 for a two-sided test. The analyses were performed using the SURVIVAL procedure in SUDAAN (version 9.0.1, SAS–Windows). statistical software to account for the complex sample design. In all multivariate models, a complete-case approach was used, but the WMH survey used multiple imputation methods to impute missing values for the childhood family adversities. The survival analyses employed sample weights to adjust for differences in probability of selection. The unadjusted cumulative percentage with adult onset of frequent or severe headache by age for persons with v. without early-onset depression/anxiety disorder, and for persons with 0, 1 or 2+ childhood family adversities were graphed with product-limit (Kaplan–Meier) life-table estimates developed using SAS PROC LIFETEST (version 9.1.3, Windows).
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Table 1 Characteristics of participants by country and prevalence of adult-onset
headache, any childhood family adversities and early onset of any mood anxiety
disorder
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In the proportional hazard analyses of the association of number of childhood family adversities with headache, a linear relationship was found. That is, those with three or more types of childhood family adversities were at higher risk of adult-onset headache than those with one or two adversities (Table 2, model A). This was true for the analysis controlling for depression/anxiety disorders present in the previous year (Table 2, model B) as well as for the analysis controlling for onset of depression/anxiety disorders before age 21 (Table 2, model C). Early-onset depression/anxiety disorders were also associated with increased risk of adult-onset headache after controlling for the number of childhood family adversities. Female gender and higher age were associated with increased risk of adult-onset headache in all models.
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Table 2 Hazard ratios showing the association between adult onset of frequent or
severe headache and having one, two, three or more childhood family
adversitiesa,b
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When each childhood adversity was considered independently in separate models controlling for gender and age (with stratification by country), we found that sexual abuse, physical abuse, parental mental and substance use disorders, criminal behaviour and violence in the family, and other loss of parents during childhood were significantly associated with adult-onset headache, whereas parental death, divorce and economic adversity during childhood were not (Table 3). Using the same methods of analysis, each of the early-onset depression/anxiety disorders was considered in a separate model. Each disorder was found to be associated with headache, including panic disorder/agoraphobia, major depressive episode, generalised anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and social phobia.
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Table 3 Hazard ratios for the association of specific childhood adversity as
independent predictor of adult onset of frequent or severe
headachea,b
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We assessed the interaction of early-onset depression/anxiety disorders and having one or more childhood family adversities, adjusting for gender and age with stratification by country. The interaction of childhood adversity and early-onset depression/anxiety disorders was non-significant (results not shown), so there was no evidence of a synergistic effect of childhood adversity and early-onset mental disorder on risks of adult-onset headache.
Figure 1 shows the cumulative percentage by age for adult-onset headache among respondents with early-onset depression/anxiety disorders v. those without. Both curves were steeper for early adulthood as more than half of adult-onset headaches occurred between ages 21 and 40. The rate of increase and cumulative occurrence of headache were greater for those with early-onset depression/anxiety disorders than those without. As shown in Fig. 2, increase in the number of childhood family adversities was also associated with increase in the cumulative occurrence of headache. The rate of increase was similar initially for those with any number of adversities, but for those who had had more childhood family adversities it increased at a higher rate from age 30 onwards. Thus, as the respondents aged, the presence of multiple childhood family adversities was associated with a greater likelihood of headache onset.
![]() View larger version (11K): [in a new window] [as a PowerPoint slide] |
Fig. 1 Kaplan–Meier curve for adult-onset headache by age for persons with
v. without early-onset depression/anxiety disorders.
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Fig. 2 Kaplan–Meier curve for the cumulative percentage with adult-onset
headache by age for persons with none, one, and two or more childhood family
adversities.
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In our analyses that decomposed the association of specific childhood family adversities with headache risks, not all the childhood family adversities were found to predict increased risk. Sexual and physical abuse, parental mental and substance disorders and family antisocial behaviours showed the most robust associations with risk of adult-onset headache. Parental death, divorce, and economic adversity were not significantly related. This is different from a previous case–control study, which found significant associations between migraine and parental divorce and chronic financial difficulties in the family after adjustment for education, self-reported general physical health, and depression.5
Sexual abuse and physical abuse have been the most frequently studied childhood family adversities in relation to adult headache disorders. Our study confirmed previous research showing an association between childhood abuse and headache.16,17 Additionally, the association remained significant when early-onset mental disorders were included in the analysis. This is in keeping with studies showing that headache was associated with childhood family adversities after controlling for depression7 and mental disorders in general.18
Limitations
Our study has several significant limitations relevant to interpretation of
its results. Although we used age-at-onset data for childhood family
adversities and adult-onset headache to assess temporal ordering, the
cross-sectional methodology used imposed a significant shortcoming. Since
lifetime history of frequent or severe headache and of childhood family
adversities were both ascertained by retrospective self-report, there were
multiple opportunities for recall bias to affect both in a similar fashion,
thereby introducing spurious correlation. We sought to control this potential
bias by carrying out an analysis which controlled for current depression and
anxiety disorder. This analysis yielded similar results to analyses which did
not control for current mental disorder. None the less, the potential for
recall bias to influence the results reported here cannot be excluded,
especially for childhood family adversities. Although a comprehensive review
indicates that adult retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences
have a worthwhile place in research, substantial false negatives and
measurement errors remain
possible.19
Prospective research that encompasses corroborative tools of assessment of
childhood adversities is needed to address this methodological weakness of our
study. We also have not tackled the potentially different meaning and impact
of childhood adversity across the participating countries. Parental divorce,
for example, may exert dissimilar impact on individuals who grow up in
countries with different social and religious attitudes towards broken
families. Likewise, the impact of family economic adversity or parental death
may vary according to the quality of social service available in a country.
These and other cultural differences need to be examined in future
country-specific analyses that take social context into account. Regarding the
assessment of headache, it was based on a question about history of frequent
or severe headache, so that information about the subtypes, chronicity and
frequency of attacks of headache was lacking. Consequently, our findings may
not be readily compared with research that focused on specific types of
headache, especially migraine, which may differ from other kinds of chronic
headache in aetiology and the association with depression and childhood family
adversities.1,20
A broad developmental perspective
Recognising the limitations of this research, our results suggest that
childhood family adversities may predispose individuals to adult-onset
headache via mechanisms in addition to Axis I psychopathology. Prior research
has found that inadequate coping style and maladaptive personality factors are
observed among people who have experienced childhood family
adversities.21–23
Neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain areas activated during distress
caused by social adversities such as exclusion are also activated during
physical pain.24
However, it should be noted that our analyses did not identify interaction or
synergistic effects of the number of childhood family adversities with the
presence of early-onset depression/anxiety disorder.
In summary, this research found that the association of risk of developing headache was independently associated with both number of childhood family adversities and the presence of early-onset depression/anxiety disorder. Although the aetiology of headache remains poorly understood, these results suggest that a broad developmental perspective concerning risk factors for development of severe or frequent headache may be needed to understand how life stressors influence risks in combination with depression and anxiety disorders.
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S. Lee, A. Tsang, and W.-j. Guo The Composite International Diagnostic Interview in low- and middle-income countries The British Journal of Psychiatry, August 1, 2009; 195(2): 178 - 178. [Full Text] [PDF] |
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