MedPage Today – Higher surprisal scores, reflecting unusual daily experiences, were tied to migraine attacks within a day.
Surprisal’s link to migraine risk was stronger at 24 hours than 12 hours.
Findings support using surprisal as a predictive tool, shifting focus from single migraine triggers to fluctuations in daily life.
“This finding suggests that the association of daily experiences with migraine onset is not immediate in all cases and may accumulate or evolve.”
Surprisal, an information theory-based metric that gauges how unexpected a trigger is, was tied to headache occurrences, a study of migraine patients showed.
Participants with higher surprisal scores were twice as likely to experience migraine episodes over the next day compared with those with lower surprisal scores, reported Dana Turner, MSPH, PhD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and co-authors.
Higher surprisal scores were tied to increased migraine risk at 12 hours and at 24 hours , Turner and colleagues wrote in JAMA Network Open.
Variability between individuals lessened the link between surprisal and migraine risk in a random effects model, leading to a 12-hour OR of 1.56.
The data independently confirm earlier findings that combining many individual headache triggers into a total surprisal score offers a meaningful measure of short-term migraine risk, Turner said.
“This study supports the idea that rather than any single individual trigger serving to induce an attack, the unexpectedness or atypical combination of daily experiences may play a key role in shaping short-term vulnerability to attacks,” Turner told MedPage Today.
“This perspective shifts attention away from any single trigger or even static trigger lists — for example, that stress causes a headache — toward understanding how fluctuations in a person’s lived environment dynamically modulates risk,” she added.
Turner and colleagues analyzed data from 109 migraineurs in a cohort study conducted between April 2021 and December 2024. Most participants (93.5%) were women, and the median age was 35.
Participants had a diagnosis of migraine with or without aura and experienced 4 to 14 headache days a month …
