Migraine: the seventh disabler

On 15th December 2012, a special edition of Lancet published the principal findings of the Global Burden of Disease Survey 2010 (GBD2010). Few reports are likely to have more profound meaning for people with headache, or carry greater promise for a better future, than the seven papers (and one in particular [1]) that were presented.GBD2010 was not the first such survey to be conducted, nor the first to give some recognition to the burden of migraine. The Global Burden of Disease Survey 2000 (GBD2000), conducted 12 years ago by the World Health Organization (WHO), listed migraine as the 19th cause of disability in the world, responsible for 1.4% of all years of life lost to disability (YLDs) [2]. This finding has been cited repeatedly ever since; it has fuelled attempts to generate political acceptance of headache as a public-health priority [3], and given credibility to calls for greater investment in headache care and research. It pushed headache into WHO’s field of view, and became an essential part of the platform on which the Global Campaign against Headache has since been built [3-5].In spite of all this, GBD2000 considerably underreported the disability that migraine imposed on people throughout the world, and gave a very poor account of headache disorders collectively. The evidence was not there. For more than half the world’s population, estimates for migraine were based on very little: data of acceptable quality were not in existence for China, India and most other countries in South East Asia, most of Africa, all of the Eastern Mediterranean and all of eastern Europe [6]. Headache disorders other than migraine did not feature in GBD2000 at all; for these disorders, at that time, dependable evidence was lacking everywhere.Filling this evidence gap has been a priority of the Global Campaign in its first years [7]. As a result, GBD2010 has been much better informed and built on much sounder foundations than its predecessor (we return to this point later). GBD