A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Mindfulness and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) Therapies on the Pain Experience of Women with Migraine

Migraines are among the most important major headaches that affect peoplechr('39')s health. The experience of pain caused by this type of headache is important and should be treated and evaluated. Therefore, the present study aimed to compare the effectiveness of mindfulness and transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) therapies on the pain experience of migraine in women.

The present study was applied and quasi-experimental utilizing a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of the present study consisted of all women referring to the specialized neurology clinics west of Tehran. From this population, 45 people with migraines were selected as the study groups by the treating physicians using purposeful sampling. All of them had completed the pain experience questionnaire before the interventions. The experimental groups then received mindfulness and TDCS interventions, and the control group did not receive any intervention. Eventually, all three groups received the post-test. After collecting the data, they were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance with SPSS V19 software.

The results showed a significant difference between the three groups of mindfulness therapy, TDCS, and control group for the variable of pain experience and its components. This difference was significant at the level of p<0.001. There was a significant difference between the mindfulness and control groups (16.723) and between the TDCS and control groups (15.784). However, there was no significant difference between the TDCS group and the mindfulness group for the pain experience variable. (1.039).

Therefore, the results showed that mindfulness and TDCS treatment methods are effective for treating migraine headaches, and specialists in the fields of psychology and health can use these treatment methods to improve migraine treatment.