health 79

According to the Professional Association of German Neurologists (BDN), migraine headaches have a high prevalence in the general population, and affect approximately one in five women. While migraines are known to be linked to an increased risk of stroke, only a few studies exist that demonstrate the relationship of migraines with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality. A team of US and German researchers have now analyzed data from more than 115,500 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II. The participants were aged between 25 and 42 years at baseline and free from cardiovascular disease and, of them, 17,531 (just over 15%) reported a physician's diagnosis of migraine. Between 1989 and 2011, cardiovascular events were observed in 1,329 of these women; 223 died as a result. "Our analysis suggests that migraine should be considered an important risk marker for cardiovascular disease, particularly in women," concludes Prof. Kurth, adding that: ...

The results of the largest genetic study on migraine thus far were published online in the journal  Nature Genetics  today, June 20. The study was based on DNA samples of 375,000 European, American and Australian participants. Almost 60,000 of them suffer from migraine. The researchers combined data from 22 genome-wide association studies including new data from around 35,000 migraine sufferers. From the millions of genetic variants analyzed, 38 independent genomic regions were shown to be associated with migraine . Only ten of these regions have been implicated in migraine susceptibility before. The study was conducted by members of the International Headache Genetics Consortium including migraine research groups from Australia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK and USA. "Our consortium is devoted to uncovering the genetic causes of migraine and during the past few years we have been able to identify many risk ...

A wide variety of pharmacological interventions such as opiates, benzodiazepines , and prophylactic medications have been described that offer partial relief to migraine sufferers. Reviews have also described a variety of empirically supported non-pharmacological approaches to preventing or stopping headaches. Recent randomized controlled trials have demonstrated the efficacy of meditation-based interventions as a treatment for headache pain. Though spiritual meditation has been found to reduce the frequency of migraines and physiological reactivity to stress, little is known about how introducing a spirituality component into a meditation intervention impacts use of analgesic medicine. The results from the study support previous research suggesting that spiritual meditation may be more effective for pain tolerance and migraine coping than non-spiritual meditation alternatives. In this study, 92 meditation-naïve participants with frequent migraines (>2 per month) were randomly ...

he study, "Headache Disorders May Be a Risk Factor for the Development of New Onset Hypothyroidism" is currently available in the online edition of  Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain . Hypothyroidism occurs when the body can't make sufficient thyroid hormone causing individuals to suffer from mood swings, weight gain, hair loss , fatigue, constipation and irregular menstrual cycles. "Our study is one of the largest studies published to date suggesting that headache disorders are a risk factor for the future development of hypothyroidism," explains Andrew Martin, lead author and a fourth-year medical student at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine. Andrew Martin, his father, Vincent Martin, MD, and colleagues at the UC College of Medicine, looked at data from 8,412 people enrolled in the Fernald Medical Monitoring Program ( FMMP ), a 20-year medical monitoring project designed to examine health outcomes of residents living near a ...

Guide-therapy randomized managed trials ( RCTs ) are troublesome to carry out as a result of it is difficult to hide a placebo when sufferers are in a position to bodily really feel a remedy that is being delivered. Now, although, researchers have efficiently accomplished the primary manual-therapy RCT with a documented profitable blinding. The three-armed trial evaluated the efficacy of chiropractic spinal manipulative remedy ( CSMT ) within the remedy of migraine versus placebo (sham chiropractic) and management (normal drug remedy). Migraine days have been considerably lowered inside all three teams from baseline to post-treatment; the impact continued within the CSMT and placebo teams in any respect follow-up time factors, whereas the management group returned to baseline. The impact of CSMT was probably attributable to a placebo response. The findings are revealed within the  European Journal of Neurology . for more information v...

Researchers from the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC used data from the electronic medical record to analyze their hospital's emergency department visits for headache pain in children ages 4 to 20 years, from 2007 to 2014. They then randomly selected 50 headache visits per year and examined patient data making sure to include variables such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, chief complaint, head injury within 48 hours, history of concussion, and past medical history. Between 2007 and 2014 at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, pediatric emergency department visits for headaches doubled from 2 percent to more than 4 percent, said primary study author Michelle Perry, MD, pediatric resident at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC . During this same time period, the admission rate for children with headache more than doubled from 10 percent of headache visits in 2007 to 24 percent in 2014. Females were more likely to be admitted for headache pain th...