We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
High levels of alexithymia as well as low scores on assertiveness have been described in patients with chronic pain and headache.
Objectives
To determine alexithymia and assertiveness scores and to explore their association with headache impact, in primary chronic headache patients.
Aims
This study aims to advance knowledge of the emotional expressiveness in headache impact.
Methods
In a sample of 62 outpatients, we used the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), the Rathus Assertiveness Scale and the Headache Impact Test (HIT-6) and applied the Pearson correlation index.
Results
77.4% of women, 36.3 years mean age. The most prevalent diagnoses are migraine combined with tension type headache (33.9%), migraine alone (32.3%) and tension-type headache alone (22.6%). Most of the patients have not any psychiatric comorbidity (77.8%). We observe a direct linear relationship and statistically significant difference, between the total impact of headache and the total score of alexithymia (r = 0.27 p = 0.03) and there is an inverse correlation between the impact of headache and the total score of the scale of assertiveness, not statistically significant (r = −0.004 p = 0.97).
Discriminated by diagnostic groups, we found that the association between assertiveness and headache impact remains only in patients with migraine alone, while that between alexithymia and headache impact is preserved in all subgroups.
Conclusion
Two indirect measures of the difficulties in emotional expressiveness such as alexithymia and assertiveness, show the expected association with headache impact. The sample size can influence some of the correlations not statistically significant.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.