Welcome to the new migraine attack manual – in 140 characters! Deciphering 21,741 tweets, researchers have found that 74 percent women shared a real-time migraine attack on twitter, followed by 17 percent men.

 

 The higher global peak of migraine tweets occurred Mondays at 14:00 GMT or 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Saving Time, the study said. It indicates a growing trend toward the cathartic sharing of physical pain as well as emotional pain on social media.

 

 “As technology and language evolve, so does the way we share our suffering. It is the first known study to show the instant and broad impact of migraine attacks on modern patients' lives by decoding manually each one of their individual attack-related tweets,” explained Alexandre DaSilva, an assistant professor at University of Michigan's school of dentistry.

 

 During the study, DaSilva's team eliminated advertising, metaphor and nonrelated migraine tweets.  Further, they analysed the meaning of each individual migraine tweet. “We sought to evaluate the instant expression of actual self-reported migraine attacks in social media,” DaSilva noted.

 

 The US accounted for 58 percent of migraine tweets followed by Europe at 20 percent. Roughly 44 percent of tweets reported that migraine attacks immediately impacted mood. The most common migraine descriptors were "worst" at nearly 15 percent and "massive" at 8 percent.

 

 Results generated unique information about who suffers from migraines and what, how, where and when they use social media to describe their pain.