According to preliminary results of an ongoing study at Columbus Children’s Hospital, to be presented at the American Headache Society’s June meeting in Chicago, parents of adolescents with migraines may have an influence on the level of pain reported. Approximately 10 percent of children and adolescents get migraines, and as many as two percent suffer from chronic migraines, meaning 15 or more headaches a month. Nearly nine times out of 10, those kids come from families who have a history of migraines, and although the migraines may be shared, researchers aren’t convinced the pain is necessarily the same. “We want to know how much of a child’s response to migraine pain is learned and how much is hereditary,” said lead author Ann Pakalnis, MD, a neurologist at Columbus Children’s and a faculty member of The Ohio State University College of … Read more

Migraines and chronic headaches are wide-spread phenomena. Twelve percent of the population, three quarters of them women, suffer at least occasionally from migraines and about 5 percent from chronic headaches. New effective methods of treatment were presented at the Congress of the European Neurological Society (ENS) in Rhodos. According to Greek researchers, migraine sufferers can eliminate symptoms altogether if they take higher doses of anti-migraine medicine for a longer period of time than is now customary. Another team of researchers has found that certain psychopharmaceuticals could serve as a new therapy option for persistent chronic headaches. Twelve percent of the population, three quarters of them women, suffer at least bouts of migraines, that much-feared type of paroxysmal pulsating headache that generally occurs in just one half of the skull and is accompanied by unpleasant symptoms like nausea and vomiting, dizziness … Read more

Migraine sufferers report worse health-related quality of life than the general population and have similar health status scores as people with debilitating chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease. A recent study, “Migraine frequency and health utilities: findings from a multi-site survey,” published in Value in Health, surveyed 150 migraine patients in the U.S. to study how migraine frequency affects quality of life. The study was co-authored by Jeffrey Brown, PhD (Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care), Peter J. Neumann, ScD (Tufts-New England Medical Center Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy), George Papadopoulos (Schering-Plough Corporation), Gary Ruoff, MD (Westside Family Medical Center), Merle Diamond, MD (Diamond Headache Clinic), and Joseph Menzin, PhD (Boston Health Economics, Inc.). The lead author, Dr. Brown, says, “We found that 45% of patients reported that their migraines were moderately or very disruptive to … Read more

There are nearly 28 million people in the United States aged 12 and older – nearly 13 percent of the population – suffering from headaches that fit the medical definition of migraine established by the IHS.  This means one in every four U.S. households has a migraine sufferer.  More than half of these sufferers have never received a physician diagnosis and most are not receiving the most appropriate treatment, despite new and effective therapies designed specifically to treat the pain and symptoms of migraine.  There have been no dramatic changes in the way physicians approach the treatment of migraine in the last ten years.   Key Findings Total U.S. migraine prevalence was virtually the same in 1999 (12.6 percent of the total population aged 12 and older) vs. 1989 (12.1 percent).  However, the total number of sufferers has increased from 24 … Read more

Adolescents from low-income families are much more likely to suffer from migraine headaches than teens from wealthier households, according to researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The findings, published in the July 3rd issue of Neurology, suggest that factors associated with low socioeconomic status–stress, poor diet and limited access to medical care, for example– increase the prevalence of migraines in young people. Led by Dr. Marcelo Bigal, assistant professor of neurology, the Einstein researchers mailed a headache questionnaire to 120,000 households encompassing 257,399 residents–a sample representative of the U.S. population with respect to gender, age and geographic region. More than 32,000 teens were identified in this sample, and more than half of them (58.4 percent) answered the questionnaire. It is well known that heredity strongly influences whether someone will develop migraine headaches. So when this … Read more