Harry Potter and the Miserable Migraines

Many young fans of the boy wizard share his headache pain, researchers say.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Friday, June 29, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

FRIDAY, June 29 (HealthDay News) -- Unlike Harry Potter, most Muggle children aren't charged with saving the world by fighting the evil Lord Voldemort.

But a surprising number of Muggles (non-wizards) do have something in common with their wizard hero: They suffer from migraine headaches.

According to research in the new issue of the journal Headache, one in 20 Muggle children and teens suffers from migraines -- many of them, like Harry's, undiagnosed.

To raise awareness of this other evil, the American and British authors of the study decided to compare Harry's symptoms with what is known about Muggle migraines.

Hallie Thomas, a 17-year-old high school graduate from Monroe, Conn., was the senior author on the research. She is a Harry Potter fan and also a migraine sufferer.

For the study, she re-read all six Harry Potter volumes published to date, highlighting the passages where he had a headache.

Those were passed on to the study's other two authors: Dr. Fred Sheftell, director of the New England Center for Headache and president-elect of the American Headache Society, and Timothy J. Steiner, a headache specialist at Imperial College of London and chairman of the World Health Organization's Global Campaign to Reduce the Burden of Headache Worldwide.

They then tried to match the references to the description of migraine in the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition or ICHD-II.

Granted, this is a Muggle book, but the study authors noted that they had no access to wizard systems of headache classification.

The Harry Potter books abound with descriptions that Muggle migraine sufferers will relate to:

• "Then a pain pierced his head like he'd never felt before, it was as though his scar was on fire..."
• "At once, a needle-sharp pain seared across Harry's scar; his head felt as though it was about to split in two..."
• "And then, without warning, Harry's scar exploded with pain. It was agony such as he had never felt in all his life; his wand slipped from his fingers as he put his hands over his face; his knees buckled; he was on the ground, and he could see nothing at all; his head was about to split open... The pain in his scar reached such a pitch that he retched, and then it diminished.
• "His scar seared and burned... the pain of it was making his eyes stream..."