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migraine-plots

Generate nice plots of my horrible migraines

Install

sudo apt-get install r-base-core

install.packages("lubridate") install.packages("dplyr") install.packages("ggplot2") install.packages("scales") install.packages("cowplot")

Methods

Logging is done as a change in symptoms is noticed, or as soon as is possible, in a simple app (called MultiLog) on my mobile phone. I compare my symptoms to what I have experienced in the past to attempt to keep to a standard scale of severity. This severity will then be represented in the figure for each hour until a change in severity is recorded. Lack of a headache is also recorded, and with great joy. This data is accurate to an hourly resolution.

Headache severity scale:

  • Light grey -- noticeable pain that interferes with work, but that can be ignored
  • Medium grey -- pain is persistent, unignorable, and concentration is extremely difficult
  • Dark grey -- even worse, and sensory input is unbearable

Additional events including presence of aura symptoms, vertigo, nausea, pressure in my head (distinct from pain), taking medication and changes in daily medication are logged (not all are visualized on the attached figure). Logging of additional events is done only at a single time point. Other subjective comments are collected, but are not analyzed.

The data collection process has been standardized since 10 Sept 2017, prior to this different methods were used.

Menstrual cycle data is collected through the app Clue, and is only available at the resolution of a day.

Figure captions

Headache intensity by day

These figures (plots/migraine-plot-YYYY.pdf), one per year from 2017 to present, show headache severity at each hour per day. The X-axis is date and time, and the Y-axis is time. So a whole day with headache is a steep diagonal line, and a single grey dot represents the headache severity for one hour.

Grey dots indicate headache pain at each severity level, as above.

Blue halos around dots indicate 40 mg eletriptan.

Red dots above headache data indicate my period, light red is spotting only.

Headache intensity by week with medication

These figures (plots/migraine-weeks-YYYY.pdf), one page per year, show the count of headache hours per week at each severity level, and are aligned with line graphs that track changes in medication.

Bar charts indicate the number of hours per week spent with each headache severity

The line graphs below the bar charts are aligned on the same time axis, and show changes in medications and dosages.

Week 52 and week 00 contain partial data due to the year boundary not aligning with the start of a week.

Headache intensity by month

This figure (plots/migraine-bar.pdf) summarizes the entire history by number of hours of headache by month at each severity from August 2017 to present.