Giving Migraine Treatments the Best Chance - The New York Times

If you've never had a migraine, I have two things to say to you:1) You're damn lucky.2) You can't begin to imagine how awful they are.I had migraines – three times a month, each lasting three days — starting from age 11 and finally ending at menopause.Although my migraines were not nearly as bad as those that afflict many other people, they took a toll on my work, family life and recreation. Atypically, they were not accompanied by nausea or neck pain, nor did I always have to retreat to a dark, soundless room and lie motionless until they abated. But they were not just"bad headaches" — the pain was life-disrupting, forcing me to remain as still as possible.Despite being the seventh leading cause of time spent disabled worldwide, migraine"has received relatively little attention as a major public health issue," Dr. Andrew Charles, a California neurologist, wrote recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. It can begin in childhood, becoming more common in adolescence and peaking in prevalence at ages 35 to 39. It afflicts two to three times more women than men, and one woman in 25 has chronic migraines on more than 15 days a month.But while the focus has long been on head pain, migraines are not just pains in the head. They are a body-wide disorder that recent research has shown results from"an abnormal state of the nervous system involving multiple parts of the brain," said Dr. Charles, of the U.C.L.A. Goldberg Migraine Pr...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs