Quality of life and psychosocial impairment of patients with chronic primary headache - a review of instruments and preliminary results

The quality of life is of increasing importance in the evaluation of therapy. To date, a plenty of different instruments to examine quality of life has been developed which describe the quality of life or the psychosocial impairment of patients in different ways and with different methods. For chronic headache, it has to be decided whether unspecific, pain-specific or headache-specific instruments should be applied to measure quality of life. The most common German instruments for the measurement of quality of life are introduced and compared. Preliminary results obtained by the Headache Disability Inventory (HDI) show that it is useful to develop headache-specific instruments. Finally, the impact of the comorbidity of headache and psychiatric diseases such as depression on the quality of life is discussed.