The Psychological Characteristics of the Patients with Tension-Type Headache: Using MMPI

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The investigations of personality traits have been the issue of many studies on patients with tension-type headache. However, there was few comparison study of personality traits between the patients with episodic tension-type headache (ETTH) and chronic tension-type headache (CTTH) using Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). METHODS: The study was consecutively made of the personality profiles of two groups with ETTH (137 patients) and CTTH (115 patients) in accordance with the International Headache Society (IHS) criteria, employing the MMPI. RESULTS: The two groups could be classified into three clusters by a multivariate cluster analysis, which are relatively normal profile (cluster I), somatic profile (cluster II, elevated Hs-D-Hy scales), and psychosomatic profile (cluster III, elevated Pa-Pt-Sc-Si and Hs-D-Hy scales). The proportion of the patients with CTTH in the psychosomatic profile group was stastically more significant (59.6%) than that of the patients with ETTH (40.4%) by a chi-square test. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that the psychosomatic profile might be more common in the CTTH patients than in the ETTH patients.