One thing is certain: you're unlikely to see migraine as the work of evil spirits raging in your head! But this was how it was viewed by the Sumarians, Babylonians and Assyrians who suffered from this diabolical illness as long ago as 4000 BC and who tried to drive out the "evil spirits" with a quick prayer to the gods or - more profanely - with evil-smelling substances. If none of this helped, in especially severe cases the doctors drilled a hole in the sufferer's skull (a procedure known as trepanation) to allow the evil spirits to escape.

The fact that your earliest forebears suffered from migraine is probably of no help to you. But it may be a comfort to know that much more effective remedies are available nowadays than drilling a hole in your skull! And it may also be a comfort to you to know that you are not alone, and that there are many millions of other migraine sufferers. The advantage of this is that - despite the suffering- because migraine is one of the most widespread disorders, there is naturally a great deal of research being carried out into its causes and effective treatments.

Migraine has darkened the lives of a great many people. Great leaders and commanders such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson, the "architect" of the American Declaration of Independence, are said to have been affected, as were the painters Vincent van Gogh, George Seurat and Claude Monet, the writers Cervantes ("Don Quixote"), Lewis Carroll ("Alice in Wonderland") and

Virginia Woolf. The "inventor" of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, also suffered from migraine, as did the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, the founder of a new world ideology.

In the industrialised countries, one in twelve people are migraine sufferers, but in third world countries the figure is much lower - evidently a sign that "typical" features of the industrialised world such as stress, unusual pressures, traffic noise etc. can trigger migraines. Women are much more badly affected than men - with three female sufferers to every male.

Although migraine can occur at any age, in half of all cases it is children and young people under the age of twenty who experience migraine and its unpleasant side effects for the first time. Migraine attacks occur particularly frequently up to the age of forty, after which they
gradually decline or even stop altogether.