Migraine Disability Assessment Score

 The Migraine Disability Assessment Score is a quantifying series of five questions, used by doctors all over the world, to evaluate exactly how severe a patient's migraine headaches are. The MIDAS can also be used to determine the migraine headaches' disabling level for daily activities.

The MIDAS, as stated above, has five basic questions, and to extra ones that are asked to the patient. Only the first five questions with numeric results, are used to determine the patient's score. The results are based on the number of days, in the past 3 months, that the patient has suffered with their migraine headaches. Instead of counting merely the number of migraine headache episodes the patient has, if they have more than a one day long migraine headache, the total number of days that the migraine headache lasted is used, rather than counting it as only one migraine.

I thought that the MIDAS sounded interesting, and, although I am disabled from my migraines, I thought I'd play along and take the test. My estimated number of days for each question will be in noted in blue.

The MIDAS Questionnaire:

1. In the last 3 months, how many days did you miss school or work because of your headaches? ---- no. of days.  20 days
2.In the last 3 months, how many days was your productivity reduced by half or more because of your headaches? Exclude the days of question 1. ---- no. of days.  20 days
3. In the last 3 months, how many days you did not do household works because of headache? ----- no. of days. 30 days
4. In the last 3 months, how many days your productivity in household work reduced by half or more due to your headaches. Exclude the days of question number three, when you did not do household work. ------- no. of days. 25 days
5.In the last 3 months, how many days did you miss family, social, or leisure activities because of your headaches? ------ no. of days.  40 days

So let's add up the score form these five questions that will form my score, and I get a score of 185.

Additional MIDAS Questionnaire:

> In the last 3 months, how many days did you have a headache? If headache was more than 1 day continuously, count each day. 90 days (aka full 3 months)
> How painful were these headaches, on a scale of 0-10, with 0 for no pain, and 10 for most severe pain one can have. average: 7/10

 Disability Assessment Score for Migraine:

> Grade I - Score of 0-5 (minimal or infrequent disability)
> Grade II - Score of 6-10 (mild or less frequent disability)
> Grade III - Score of 11-20 (moderate disability)
> Grade IV - Score of more than 20 (severe disability)

Let's see, last time I checked, a score of 185 is way higher than a score of 20, so I'm soundly in the Grade IV department, with a  severe disability. 

Who's surprised? Not I. Still, it's interesting to see just how disabled I can be qualified as, even when I think that I'm doing a fairly well.

Quantum in me fuit,
~ Gretchen


All factual information used in this blog was found here from a fake-cut from the Migraine Research Foundation's homepage.