Prevalence, demographics, comorbidities, and treatment patterns of patients with the trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias: a retrospective analysis of United States electronic health records.

BACKGROUND

The study of the trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias (TAC) has been limited by difficulty aggregating sufficient numbers of patients. We used the Epic Cosmos electronic health record research platform to harness nationwide data from health care systems across the United States using the Epic electronic health record to analyze the prevalence, demographics, comorbid conditions and treatments for the TACs.

METHODS

We queried the Epic Cosmos electronic health record database for patients with diagnoses of hemicrania continua, cluster headache, paroxysmal hemicrania, and SUNCT. Prevalences, demographics were determined from this database and comorbid conditions and treatments for these conditions were analyzed.

RESULTS

Our study included 152,727 patients with cluster headache, 59,312 patients with paroxysmal hemicrania, 19,321 patients with hemicrania continua, and 6,291 patients with SUNCT. Five-year prevalence of cluster headache was highest (56.7 per 100,000), followed by paroxysmal hemicrania (22.0 per 100,000), hemicrania continua (7.2 per 100,000) and SUNCT (2.3 per 100,000). All four TACs showed a higher prevalence in women. Migraine was common in all four conditions and patients with cluster headache had the highest rates of nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis use disorders. Indomethacin was notably underutilized for the indomethacin-responsive TACs.

CONCLUSION

We use a national electronic medical record database to give insight into elements of the TACs that have been previously limited by the relative rarity of these diseases.