Worldwide there is an urgent need to face the increasing burden of chronic non communicable conditions affecting global health, by providing affordable, feasible, and sustainable public health responses. Primary headaches represent one of the most relevant global public health problems, affecting a total of 52% of the world's population, with tension-type headache afflicting 26% of the population, migraine 14%, and headache present for more than fifteen days a month 4.6%. The Global Burden of Diseases 2019 indicated that this pathology is the most prevalent among non-communicable diseases when analyzing women under 50. Importantly, each day, 15.8% of the world's population had a headache. Furthermore, the long-term booster effect of COVID-19 on headaches burden has yet to be quantified. If we add to this the share of secondary headaches, the overall picture of these pathologies on the population becomes untenable requiring coordinated and structured interventions between stakeholders such as, academies, scientific and patient associations, publishers, drug companies inspired by the policies and recommendations of international organizations (UN, WHO).
The goal for this Collection is to create a cross-disciplinary space for researchers, clinicians, academics, educators, patients’ organizations, and policy makers, working within and across clinical, social, and public health paradigms to address and reduce the burden of headache globally and reduce disability from this major non communicable disease. We hope to bring together stakeholders who support the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda, in particular Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that is “ensure healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages” and the following associated targets: reduce mortality, and morbidity, from non-communicable diseases; strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse and achieve universal health coverage.
Our aim is ambitious as we propose to the global community to rethink how to scale and implement actions using headache as a public health target to rethink policies towards SDG 3 by 2030.
We welcome scientific contributions reporting or discussing evidence-based strategies to:
- Reduce burden of primary headaches by reducing chronicity, barriers and impact on daily lives in a biopsychosocial perspective;
- Reduce medication overuse in acute management of primary headaches: strategies at primary, secondary, tertiary levels of care in a global perspective;
- Promote education of health care professionals in the management of primary headaches and define feasible methodology to support health-care facilities development to deliver comprehensive headache care pathways;
- Grant access to existing preventive and curative drugs for headaches in LMIC countries and facilitate the inclusion of these countries in research and development of new medicines (RCTs or RWS);
- Develop and implement training opportunities and education in low- and middle-income countries to improve the skills of health care professionals for management of headaches in primary and secondary care;
- Build a global alliance against headache disorders among headache lay and professional organizations as well as policy makers and relevant health and social authorities and stakeholders to respond to public health needs in headache area.
