Headaches Affect Almost a Third of People Worldwide

Key Takeaways

• Nearly 1 in 3 people worldwide have a headache disorder

• Women have twice the burden of headaches as men

• Medication overuse contributes significantly to headache disability

THURSDAY, Nov. 13, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Do you have regular migraine headaches? If so, you’ve got a lot of company.

Nearly 1 in every 3 people worldwide suffer from a headache disorder, affecting almost 3 billion people, researchers will report in the December issue of The Lancet Neurology.

It’s especially bad for women, who experience more than double the lifetime headache-related health problems than men, researchers found.

“Women experience significantly higher levels of headache-related disability because they have headaches more frequently and for longer durations than men,” investigator Yvonne Xu, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said in a news release.

“Recognizing this is essential for improving how we prevent and manage headache disorders worldwide,” Xu added.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 42,000 people from 18 countries to create an estimate of the global health burden caused by headaches in the year 2023.

Results showed that headache disorders ranked sixth among all causes of disability, with a rate of 542 years lived with disability for every 100,000 people. That statistic captures the total time people spend living with health problems that limit their daily activities and well-being.

The disability burden of headache disorders was more than twice as high for women – 740 years lived with disability per 100,000 women compared to 364 per 100,000 men, the study said.

Across every age group, women consistently spent more time dealing with headaches than men, researchers found.

Migraine headaches account for about 90% of headache-related years lived with disability, even though they’re less common than tension headaches, researchers said

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Migraines caused a rate of nearly 488 years lived with disability per 100,000, compared with 54 disability years associated with tension headaches.

The study said people are compounding these headaches by using too many painkillers, which can cause medication-overuse headaches.

Medication overuse accounted for nearly 23% of years lived with disability among male migraine sufferers and 14% among women with migraine, researchers found.

The numbers were even worse for tension headaches. Medication overuse contributed to 59% of years lived with disability among men managing tension headaches, and 56% among women, the study found.

“Our findings show that a large part of the global headache burden is preventable,” lead researcher Andreas Kattem Husøy, a post-doctoral fellow of neuromedicine and movement science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said in a news release. 

“Integrating headache services into primary care, especially in low- and middle-income countries where effective treatments remain scarce, could reduce lost productivity and improve quality of life for hundreds of millions,” Husøy said.

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more on medication-overuse headaches.

SOURCES: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, news release, Nov. 12, 2025; The Lancet Neurology, December 2025

What This Means For You

People with frequent headaches should talk to their doctor about their use of painkillers, as overuse of headache meds can make their condition worse.