Aura Migraines In Mid-life Women Linked to Brain Adjustments Later
The women were almost twice as likely to show small areas called lesions in the brains cerebellum, which controls motor activities and balance, than women who didnt have headaches, according to research published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Men in the study who had aura migraines in mid-life didnt show a statistically significant increase in cerebellum brain lesions compared with men who didnt get headaches, the research found.
Scientists said there is no evidence that the so-called “silent” lesions, which can be as small as a pinpoint and are common in many older people, affect mental or motor function as adults age. Still, the study of more than 4,600 men and women in Iceland is the largest prospective research to show that migraines occurring in midlife may affect the brain years later, said Lenore Launer, chief of the neuroepidemiology section of the Laboratory of Epidemiology, Demography and Biometry at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland.
“The importance of this study is it suggests that migraines are not just an episodic condition,” Launer said in a telephone interview. “It may lead to long-term changes in the brain. At this point theres no real clinical message for people with migraines. This really needs to be investigated further.”
Earlier Findings
One previous study of 435 younger people in the Netherlands found a similar association between migraines with aura and brain lesions, Launer said. Researchers do not know yet whether such brain lesions harm health, though they are also linked to cardiovascular risk factors, including hypertension, Launer said.
Migraines may cause intense head pain, and auras include such symptoms as dizziness, flashing lights, blind spots, and zigzag lines that advance the headache by a 10 minutes to 30 minutes, according to the National Womens Health Information Center.
This type of headache afflicts nearly 30 million or 11 percent of Americans and may cause sensitivity to light, nausea and vomiting. About 20 percent of migraines also include aura- related symptoms, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Women are three to four times as likely as men to get migraines, most commonly between the ages of 20 and 45.
MRI Scans
In the new research, Launer and her colleagues looked at men and women who were originally part of a heart-disease study in Iceland that began in 1967. Between 1972 and 1986, when participants were an average age of 50.9, they were asked about the frequency and type of headaches they experienced. Doctors performed magnetic resonance imaging scans on two areas of the brain between 2002 and 2006 when the subjects average age was 76.2 years.
The men and women in the study were divided into four groups: Those who had a migraine with aura, migraine headaches without aura, non-migraine headaches once or more each month and no headaches.
In the study, 17 percent of women had migraine headaches, including 10.3 percent who experienced auras, while only 5.7 percent of the men had migraines and 4.2 percent had auras as well.
Previous Studies
Migraines have been associated with stroke and heart disease in previous studies. A 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that middle-aged women who have migraines with aura are at a higher risk for heart attack, stroke, chest pain and death from heart disease than women who dont have migraines.
A September 2008 study in the journal Neurology by researchers in Austria and Italy also found that migraine sufferers may have a higher risk of developing deadly blood clots.
Todays study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Icelandic Heart Association and the Icelandic Parliament.
Caution
The findings “should be interpreted with caution,” wrote doctors Tobias Kurth, with the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris and Harvard University in Boston, and Christophe Tzourio with the University Pierre et Marie Curie, in an accompanying editorial in the journal.
“It is premature to conclude that migraine has hazardous effects on the brain,” they wrote. “Brain scans among patients with migraine should not be initiated to detect silent brain lesions but to rule out rare secondary forms or migraine among those patients with atypical migraine forms or migraine courses.”