The study demonstrated a high prevalence of migraine and a very high prevalence of headache on  ≥15 days/month, and revealed unmet health-care needs of people with headache in Russia.

Headache is common, burdensome and costly in Russia and, manifestly, poorly mitigated by existing healthcare. Structured healthcare services for headache need to be urgently put in place.

BackgroundEvaluation of the prevalence and impact of headache on the preceding day (“headache yesterday”; HY) is a new approach, allowing more precise estimation of headache-attributed burden without recall error. The aim of the study was to estimate the national burden attributable to headache disorders in Russia by applying measures of prevalence of HY and its impact on productivity and daily activities in the general population.MethodsWe interviewed a representative population-based sample face-to-face by visiting randomly selected households throughout Russia. We randomly selected one adult aged 18–65 years from each. We followed a structured questionnaire including diagnostic questions, enquiry into occurrence of HY and various aspects of attributed burden.ResultsParticipation rate was 74.3%. One in seven participants (14.5%; men 9.1%: women 19.3%) reported HY. Approximately half of these had one of the subtypes of headache occurring on ≥15 days/month; the remainder had episodic migraine or tension-type headache almost equally. Mean duration of headache was 6.0 ± 4.4 hours. In 88.3% headache intensity was moderate or severe (mean 2.1 on a scale 1–3) and in 73.9% HY impaired daily activity. Loss of productivity at work due to headache totalled 2.6 million person-years/year, or 4.0% of workforce capacity. This estimate exceeded by 70% a previous estimate from the same survey based on recall over the preceding 3 months. There was greater impact on other daily activities.ConclusionRecall-error-free estimation shows lost productivity every day due to headache in the Russian population is enormously high. Measures to redress these losses – effective structured health-care services supported by educational programmes – should be seen as a public-health priority while almost certainly being cost-saving.