A recent study published in the Pain Medicine revealed that kinesiophobia is associated with worsened cutaneous allodynia severity rather than its presence in migraine patients. Education strategies should be executed as negative beliefs related to exercise despite its evidence of an advantage in migraine treatment.

Kinesiophobia is defined as debilitating fear of physical movement and activity due to the feeling of vulnerability caused by painful injury or reinjury. This is escorted by fear avoidance behaviours, which are defined as evading movement and activity not to induce pain. Mariana Tedeschi Benatto et al. focused on investigating kinesiophobia in patients with migraine and to determine its association and correlation with cutaneous allodynia and the clinical manifestations of migraine.This was a cross-sectional study set in a headache clinic of a university-based hospital.

A total of 89 patients diagnosed with migraine were enrolled in this study. The patients completed the 12-item Allodynia Symptom Checklist (ASC-12) and the Tampa Scale for Kinesiophobia (TSK) to describe the duration, frequency, and intensity of migraine attacks, along with the number of years with migraine. Kinesiophobia was prevalent in 53% of patients and was concerned with the  severity of cutaneous allodynia rather than its presence. Kinesiophobia was neither associated with migraine nor ASC-12 score, TSK score or the clinical migraine properties. The subjects with migraine, with or without kinesiophobia, assumed that physical activity could not help to control or relieve their pain.