Migraines Linked to Heart Disease
The 28 million Americans who suffer from migraines may already know that they're at increased risk of stroke. Now, new research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine lends support to an association with cardiovascular disease, too. The study of 1,449 men, a follow-up to similar findings on heart risk in women published last July, showed that men with migraines have a 42 percent increased risk of heart attack compared with other men.
"It was a very consistent finding with the pattern we saw among women," says Tobias Kurth, the study's author and an epidemiologist at Brigham and Woman's Hospital, who tracked the men for an average of 15.7 years. At this point, notes Kurth, the mechanism behind the link remains unclear.
Some experts caution that more work is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn. Stephen Silberstein, director of the headache center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and a migraine expert currently working on a project about connections between the heart and migraines, points to discrepancies between the men's and women's studies that merit further investigation. Notably, Kurth found that in women, only migraines with aura were strongly linked to cardiovascular disease, while aura-free migraines posed no higher risk. For the men, information on whether migraines were accompanied by aura was unavailable. So it's unclear whether men who don't experience them are at any higher risk. A further puzzle: The association between migraine and heart disease lessens as people age and eventually disappears.
While the research continues, people who have migraines can only benefit by exercising, watching what they eat, and stopping smoking. "But people shouldn't be scared by this study. For cardiovascular disease, the other risk factors are overwhelming in comparison to migraines," says Kurth.