Psychological changes accompanying non-pharmacological treatment of chronic headache: the effects of outcome.

Several prior studies suggest that non-drug treatment for chronic headache is accompanied by concomitant reductions in patients' anxiety, depression and somatization. It is currently unclear, however, whether such beneficial side effects are a function of degree of headache relief or are due simply to receiving treatment. Most work to date in this area has treated outcome as a dichotomous variable. The present report employed a regression approach which treats outcome (degree of headache relief) as a continuous variable in the study of 149 chronic headache patients and their accompanying psychological changes. Anxiety and depression were significantly reduced for headache patients regardless of degree of headache relief. With somatization, however, degree of headache relief had a significant effect; the greater the reduction in headache, the fewer somatic concerns were expressed, especially for mixed headache.