Dawn Marcus MD - 10 Simple Solutions to Migraines: Recognize Triggers, Control Symptoms, and Reclaim Your Life

For years, Ive been trying to keep up my professional life in spite of my headaches. My doctor said the headaches are probably from work stress, but I even get them on weekends and vacations. Ive tried several medications, but nothing seems to help. I miss family and social events, and I even lost a work promotion. I feel like these headaches are controlling my life.

Untreated migraine can seem to control your life dictating if you can go to work or a childs soccer game, limiting what foods you can eat, and causing frustration and depression. The good news for migraine sufferers is that there are a lot of effective treatments available to help prevent and treat headaches. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix or simple cure for migraines. With education and consistent application of headache management techniques, most migraine sufferers can significantly reduce their headaches and the impact migraine has on their lives.

There is no X-ray or blood test to identify migraine. Migraine is diagnosed when a person has several of these typical headache features:

• pain on one side of the head.
• pain that feels like a throb or pulse.
• pain that limits activities.
• a need to dim lights or go to a dark room.
• a need to avoid noises or go to a quiet room.
• nausea or vomiting.
• odors like smoke and perfume are nauseating.
• bending over with head between knees worsens pain.

Not everyone with migraine has all of these features. You may have a severe, throbbing pain on both sides of the head that makes you seek a dark, quiet room. Even though the pain affects both sides of the head, most of the headache characteristics are migraine features. You may notice different characteristics with different headache attacks. For example, some migraines may cause throbbing pain and vomiting, while others cause a dull pain without vomiting. Headaches that limit your activities and make you close curtains, turn off the television, and avoid odors are probably also migraines. Remember, you dont have to vomit or even be nauseated for your headache to be a migraine.

When you see a doctor for migraines, youll probably hear that everything looks normal. Your doctor means that you dont have another serious illness, a brain tumor, an aneurysm, or an infection causing the headache. This doesnt mean that migraine is imaginary. It just means that todays tests arent sensitive enough to find the abnormalities in the body that result in migraine. Research studies have identified several important factors that contribute to migraine, including an inherited headache susceptibility and increased sensitivity of the brain to pain messages.

Headache Susceptibility

Like many health conditions, migraine is probably caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Migraine tends to run in families. About half to two-thirds of migraineurs (people with migraine) have close relatives with migraine. Migraine is more likely to run on the mothers side of the family. A study of over 8,000 adult twin pairs found migraine in about 12 percent (Honkasalo et al. 1995). When one twin had migraine, an identical twin (who shares the same genetics) was over twice as likely to also have migraine compared with a nonidentical twin. This study showed that about half the risk for migraine comes from your genes. The other half comes from environmental factors.

So far, studies have not identified a specific gene abnormality that causes most kinds of migraine. Familial hemiplegic migraine is a rare type of migraine that has been linked to specific gene abnormalities. People with familial hemiplegic (meaning half-body paralysis) migraine experience paralysis or weakness over half of the body during migraine attacks. Other family members will have the same type of migraine attacks with paralysis. In these people, genetic mutations have been found on chromosomes number one and nineteen. Although more typical migraine attacks also run in families, these same chromosome abnormalities have not been seen in typical migraineurs.

Migraine Triggers

If you inherited a susceptibility to migraine, a variety of environmental factors may trigger your headache. As you can see from the table, each trigger usually provokes a migraine for only about 10 to 30 percent of people with migraine (Marcus 2003b).