Dissociative disorders have comorbidity with conversion disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression and somatization disorder. Though dissociative disorders and medical illness comorbidity is not investigated enough, epilepsy, cronic pain such as headache, pelvic pain and backpain are frequent with childhood trauma and dissociative disorders. Few studies indicated that headache is more frequent in people with childhood trauma but the relationship between dissociative experiences and headache, childhood and other traumas is not investigated enough.

The aim of this study is to investigate the frequency of childhood trauma and dissociative disorders and the relationship between them among patients with cronic headache.

DIS-Q, SDQ, DES and Childhood Trauma Questionare is given to 90 patients presented to Neurology headache unit. Patients scored DIS-Q>2 or SDQ>30 or DES>25 are called for another session to apply DDIS and SCID-D.

46,7% of the patients had comorbid psychiatric illness. In this population the percentage of childhood trauma was 58,9% (34,4% neglect; 24,7% physical abuse; 22,6% emotional abuse; 10,8% sexual abuse). 21,1% of the patients had at least one suicide attempt; 17,8% had self destructive behaviour. DDIS was applied to 33 and SCID-D to 19 of 90 patients. Any type of dissociative disorders is diagnosed in 31 of 33 patients evaluated with DDIS.

We found high prevelance of childhood trauma and dissociative disorders among patients who present to neurology headache unit. These findings may indicate that childhood trauma can play a role in the development of dissociative disorders and somatic symptoms such as headache.