Carbon Chemist

Tag: migraines

  • Patients Are Turning to Vibrators to Relieve Their Migraines

    Patients Are Turning to Vibrators to Relieve Their Migraines

    [ad_1]

    My friend Jack suffers from the most terrible migraines. But he has an unusual solution. When his migraine starts, he lays down and gently straps a vibrator to the top of his forehead. He swears that it offers instant relief from the pain.

    Though unconventional, Jack’s idea has historic roots. In 1892, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot observed that Parkinson’s patients showed improvements in their tremors after prolonged carriage rides. He attributed this to rhythmic vibrations and fashioned a “fauteuil trepidant”—a shaking chair, which replicated the movement. His student, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, later extended the technique to treat migraines using a vibrating helmet. Both therapies provided “a powerful sedative for the nervous system,” wrote Charcot.

    Though these early inventions fell out of favor, recent studies are revisiting the potential of vibration therapy for treating migraines, and are starting to reveal why vibration might be the breakthrough migraine sufferers have been seeking. “Some of the people using vibration as a therapy for migraine are experiencing huge benefits, it’s very exciting to see,” says Tie-Quang Li at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who has investigated the effects of vibration on migraines.

    Despite migraines affecting an estimated 1 billion people worldwide, we know very little about how they are caused or how to treat them. Migraines usually begin with an aura—visual disturbances such as flashing lights or shimmering spots—followed by pain, blurred vision, nausea, and sensitivity to light.

    While the exact causes of migraine remain unclear, focus has shifted from early theories that blamed dilated blood vessels to the role of the hypothalamus, a brain structure that is involved with pain messages, and inflammation of the meninges, the three layers of tissue that protect the brain and spinal cord. Current migraine drugs constrict blood vessels or block receptors in the pain network, but they don’t work for everyone and can cause side effects.

    This has led many to explore alternative remedies, such as vibration therapy. Online forums are full of similar anecdotes to Jack’s. “I massaged my neck with a vibrator, and it completely removed the migraine pain I had been suffering with for years,” wrote one Reddit user.

    While some research posits that vibration simply distracts from the pain, recent evidence suggests more is going on. In the first trial of its kind, Jan-Erik Juto and Rolf Hallin at the Karolinska Institute inserted a catheter with a vibrating balloon into the nostril of migraine sufferers at the start of an attack. The volunteers recorded their migraine pain before, during, and after the 15-minute treatment.

    The small pilot study showed promise: 17 out of 18 people reported at least 50 percent pain relief, compared with three of 17 people who received a placebo treatment. Moreover, half of the people who received the treatment were completely pain-free 15 minutes after it finished, compared with only two in the placebo group.

    In the paper, Juto and Hallin speculate that nasal vibration targets a collection of nerve cells called the sphenopalatine ganglion, or SPG. Located just under the nasal membrane, the SPG is connected to the hypothalamus. During a migraine attack, the hypothalamus is thought to lose control over a collection of structures in the brain called the limbic system, which affects how a person responds to pain. By stimulating the SPG and indirectly the hypothalamus, vibration may help restore control.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why Women Get Migraines More Than Men

    Why Women Get Migraines More Than Men

    [ad_1]

    Migraine attacks are no ordinary headache. They can cause intense pain and sickness, lasting hours or even days, making it impossible to do anything but rest in a dark, quiet room. And for millions of women, these debilitating attacks aren’t just an occasional experience but a recurring ordeal.

    Women suffer from migraines three times as often as men, with episodes that are more prolonged and intense. “It’s far more common than most people realize,” says Anne MacGregor, a specialist in headache and women’s health. Despite various treatment options, migraines remain the leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs)—a measure of disease burden that accounts for time lost to ill health—for women between the ages of 15 and 49. While there’s still some mystery around how migraines work, one reason for this sex difference is hormones.

    During early childhood, boys are slightly more prone to migraines than girls, but puberty tips the balance dramatically. At this time, sex hormones begin to fluctuate and trigger physical changes including the onset of menstruation. This is often when girls experience their first migraine. From puberty onwards, girls experience migraines at a higher rate than boys, with this disparity growing more pronounced as people reach their mid-thirties and persisting into late life. “It’s chaotic at the two ends of a woman’s reproductive years,” MacGregor says.

    In adulthood, many women who suffer from migraines report experiencing attacks associated with their menstrual cycle. A sudden drop in estradiol—a potent form of estrogen—is thought to play a key role. A few days before menstruation, known as the late luteal phase, estradiol levels plummet. Women who are susceptible to migraines tend to experience a faster rate of estradiol decline around the time of their period compared to women who don’t. While estrogen drops around ovulation, too, the decline is not as rapid, which might explain why migraines aren’t as common at this time. The role of estrogen has also been observed in transgender women on hormone therapy, who show similar migraine frequency to cisgender women.

    Periods of fluctuating estrogen are also tied to migraines in women. As women hit perimenopause, the transitional period leading up to menopause, hormones become especially erratic. “Those women who didn’t particularly have menstrual migraine beforehand become more likely to experience it during perimenopause,” MacGregor says. After menopause, some experience relief. “But it’s important to say that patterns are variable—not everyone gets better,” says Richard Lipton, a neurologist and epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

    Estrogen’s link to migraine is well documented, but researchers don’t yet fully understand how it contributes to the onset and progression of migraine. Lipton explains that migraine is a disorder characterized by a sensitive brain. “When I say sensitive, I mean vulnerable to exogenous factors that make migraine more likely,” he says. Something like a change in hormones can trigger a reaction.

    But estrogen doesn’t act alone. Changing estrogen levels also influence other hormones such as serotonin, which typically protects against migraine by lowering pain sensitivity. When estrogen levels drop, so do serotonin levels, increasing the likelihood of migraine. Triggers also act in tandem. When enough factors align—such as the drop in estrogen, combined with a lack of sleep, irregular meals, dehydration, or stress— an attack can ensue.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Multiple Ways Climate Change Threatens to Make Migraines Worse

    The Multiple Ways Climate Change Threatens to Make Migraines Worse

    [ad_1]

    Migraines have long had an intimate relationship with the elements. Alongside stress and hormones, fluctuations in meteorological conditions are one of the most commonly cited triggers for an attack. “Patients will often say that they can predict the weather,” says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center at University of Cincinnati and president of the US National Headache Foundation. They may foresee rainfall two or three days out, as a blossoming migraine alerts them to a drop in barometric pressure.

    Martin has researched the impact of temperature and other weather conditions on migraines, and he believes the climate crisis—which brings warming temperatures and more extreme weather events—could worsen the disease. “I think [climate change] is going to have an enormous effect on migraine,” he says.

    This summer, Martin and his colleagues presented a study that reviewed over 70,000 daily diary records of 660 migraine patients and cross-referenced them with regional weather data, such as wind speed, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The researchers found that, for every daily temperature increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit, there was a 6 percent increase in occurrence of headaches. One reason heat might trigger migraines could be due to the loss of water and electrolytes through sweat, Martin says; it could also be that the sun acts as a photic trigger, meaning its bright light could spark a migraine.

    Other research has similarly found a link between rising temperatures and migraines. A 2015 study looked at emergency department admissions due to migraine at a hospital in Turkey over a year and compared them against different weather parameters, such as temperature, humidity, and pressure. It found the number of migraine patients rose as temperatures increased and humidity decreased.

    Fred Cohen, assistant professor of medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and a coauthor on the study with Martin, is concerned that the changing climate could directly impact migraine burden. He led a separate review paper published earlier this year that uncovered a peculiar trend. The review found that while the prevalence of migraines—meaning the number of people who get them—has stayed around the same in the US over the past 30 years, migraine-related disability—which is determined by how much time patients lose for work and socializing due to migraines—has mushroomed.

    Cohen and his coauthors discovered that the number of people reporting migraine-related disability had almost doubled by some measures. This could in part be because doctors have gotten better at assessing migraines, or because people have become more aware of their condition and more comfortable discussing it. But also, Cohen says, it could be because “something’s going on.” One explanation the study authors suggest is the changing environment.

    It’s not just rising temperatures that migraine sufferers should be concerned about, either. Climate change is associated with an increase in air pollutants, such as those produced by wildfires, which are another known trigger for migraines. Although the mechanism by which pollution triggers migraines is not yet understood, multiple studies have found that short-term exposure to air pollutants is accompanied by a jump in migraine-specific emergency department visits. Indeed, during the intense wildfires on the east coast of North America last summer, “calls to the headache center were skyrocketing,” says Cohen.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Strange Visual Auras Could Hold the Key to Better Migraine Treatments

    Strange Visual Auras Could Hold the Key to Better Migraine Treatments

    [ad_1]

    Exactly why CSD starts, nobody knows. Similarly, plenty of mysteries remain about what activates the pain of migraines. Past studies have proposed that migraine headaches occur when something in the cerebrospinal fluid indirectly activates nerves in the nearby meninges, the layers of membrane between the brain and the skull. Rasmussen’s experiment, led by neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard, initially set out to find evidence to support this—but they came away empty-handed. “We didn’t get anything,” he says.

    So they tried a different approach, injecting fluorescent tracer substances into the cerebrospinal fluid and imaging the mice’s skulls. The tracers concentrated at the end of the trigeminal nerve, “these big nerve bundles that lie like two sausages on the base of the skull.” It was a big surprise, he says, to find substances were able to reach this part of the peripheral nervous system, where they could activate pain receptors. “So we got excited and also very puzzled—like, how does it even get there?” This led them to the opening—the end of the trigeminal nerve that was in open contact with the cerebrospinal fluid.

    The researchers also sampled the cerebrospinal fluid and found more than 100 proteins that rose or fell in the aftermath of CSD, suggesting potential involvement in the pain of migraine. A dozen of the proteins that increased are known to act as transmitter substances capable of activating sensory nerves, including one called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a known target for migraine drugs. Rasmussen says it was a good sign to find it among the mix. “But for us, what is most interesting is really the 11 other proteins that have not been described before,” he says—as these could open the door for new treatments.

    There are still reasons to be cautious, says Turgay Dalkara, a professor of neurology at Hacettepe University in Turkey with an interest in auras. Mouse models are useful, but the size differences in rodent and human skulls are problematic—especially when it comes to the area where the opening was found. “From the mouse to the human, the surface-volume ratio is dramatically different,” he says. The idea that Rasmussen’s team initially investigated—that CSD releases substances that activate and sensitize nerves in the meninges—remains the best supported mechanism observed in humans, he adds. Rasmussen’s finding, of this previously undiscovered spot where cerebrospinal fluid could touch nerves, should be considered a possible addition to this picture, not a replacement for it.

    Hadjikhani agrees but is nevertheless excited to find a further pathway for investigation. For doctors, the lack of understanding about how migraines work means sleuthing for the right combinations of medicines to give sufferers some relief. “You try one. You try a combination. You take one off,” she says. “You have to be Sherlock Holmes, finding what triggers things.”

    The fact that migraines vary so much means there may never be a silver bullet solution. Rasmussen hopes that, in the long term, being able to observe changes in an individual’s cerebrospinal fluid could minimize this guesswork and lead to personalized solutions.

    [ad_2]

    Source link