How common are migraine headaches?

Factual Questions
1

I work in a small office. Besides the owner, it’s me, a bookkeeper, and a customer service rep. We also have a guy who used to work here, but set up his own business in some of our space and is in and out of the office. Of the three other employees (besides me and the owner) they all miss many days a year (probably a week or two on average) because of “migraine” headaches.

Am I just lucky that I never get migraines. Come to think of it, none of my friends (that I know of) suffers from these. Neither does any of my family, as far as I know. Have I just been incredibly lucky, or have I hit the jackpot of migraine sufferers at work? Maybe there is some causal relationship between our work environment and migraines, although all three of these individuals claim that they have always had migraines.

Also, it seems that migraines are contagious(?). Once one of the cursed threee mention a migraine, it’s often within a day or three that someone else comes down with one.

2

WHO says “European and American studies have shown that 6-8% of men and 15-18% of women experience migraine each year.”

Environmental factors such as barometric pressure changes are common migraine triggers, so given that it’s not unusual for incidence of migraine to occur in groups.

(departure from GD material)

Some people tend to self-diagnose any headache as migraine. If someone is missing two weeks of work a year and is self-diagnosed and not seeing a doctor, I’d be a little skeptical. I’m a life-long migraineure and I’ve been seeing a neurologist regularly for over 10 years. I’ve also seen behavior of people who say they have a migraine doing things like shaking their head back and forth voluntarily while saying 'Oh, I have a terrible migraine." Sorry, honey, but I’m pretty sure you don’t have a migraine.

3

One way of “proving” that someone has migraines is if their headaches have four or more of the following five features:

  1. Pulsating
  2. Duration 4 to 72 hours
  3. Unilateral
  4. Nausea (associated)
  5. Disabling

A mnemonic for this is POUND (with the ‘u’ in "hours for #2 above)

Note, this rules in migraine. Failure to meet these criteria does NOT rule it out.

All above from here.