Chronic headache patients’ health behavior and health service use 12 months after interdisciplinary treatment – what do they keep in their daily routines?

Abstract

Background: We do not yet know whether or the extent to which multimodal therapy changes the health behaviors and health service use of chronic headache patients in the long term. Associations are expected between pain symptoms and pain management abilities for patients who are categorized as successfully treated and those who remain unchanged. Methods: Routine longitudinal data of an enrolment period of five years from 101 headache patients treated with a two-week, full-day, semi-inpatient multimodal pain therapy at the Interdisciplinary Pain Center of the University Clinic Erlangen were available when therapy began and 12 months after treatment. To investigate long-term changes in health behavior and health service use as well as their associations with the outcome “reduction in pain days,” we used descriptive and inferential statistics (i.e., binary logistic regression). Results: Patients who underwent interdisciplinary treatment showed statistically significant changes in their health behavior in five areas. Twelve months after treatment, we found a significantly higher frequency of engagement in athletic sports (p