[Is headache a women's disease?].

Headache is experienced by the majority of people in the population. The prevalence of migraine in women is greater than in men, and there are indications that this is also the case for non-migrainous headache. We reviewed available literature on headache epidemiology for documented knowledge on the prevalence of non-migrainous headache in men and women and severity of the disease. In this article we present a summary of 13 studies of the general population where prevalence of the common headache in men and women could be expressed as a gender ratio. The studies covered the period 1977-96, and included a total number of 75,000 people. The review confirms that non-migrainous headache is a women's disease, in that a female dominated gender ratio was found consistently throughout the studies. However, female dominance is not as great as for migraine. Varying definitions of headache resulted in a great variation in prevalence across the studies, but this did not influence the gender ratio. From the literature available no conclusions can be drawn on gender differences related to severity or frequency of the non-migrainous headache. These areas need to be explored further in order to provide adequate health care for men and women suffering from headache.