"The groundwork of all happiness is health." - Leigh Hunt

A silver lining for migraine victims?

Can there be any advantages related to migraine headaches? Most migraine victims will agree that it is a strange query. Migraine is a typical, inherited, lifelong, and sometimes debilitating disease that affects people most during their productive working and parenting years. It has been related to vascular disorders akin to stroke and heart attack, and psychiatric disorders akin to depression and anxiety. What could be good about migraine?

Migraines can prevent type 2 diabetes.

But possibly there may be some excellent news. Oh the study Published in JAMA Neurology suggests that, at the least in women, having a diagnosis of energetic migraine is somewhat protective against the event of type 2 diabetes. In the study, which followed nearly 75,000 women for 10 years, women with energetic migraines were 20% to 30% less prone to develop type 2 diabetes in the course of the study than women with no migraines. There was no date. Also, if the migraine condition improves and the headaches decrease, the probabilities of developing diabetes increase. This supports the notion that migraine is protective against the progression of diabetes, and just isn't simply resulting from probability.

Headache specialists had long observed that diabetes didn't develop as regularly of their migraine patient population as in the final population, so this finding was not entirely unexpected. The reason for this relationship, though, just isn't clear; After all, what could be done a couple of headache that may improve your blood sugar and insulin function? On the opposite hand, one consideration could also be that increased blood sugar levels by some means protect against headaches. Yet one other explanation could have to do with CGRP, a protein molecule within the body that's energetic in each conditions and should be a linking factor.

This was a big, well-conducted study. Two limitations were that it only studied women and that the population studied was a homogenous group of mostly white professionals. Nonetheless, experts consider the findings can potentially be generalized to other populations.

Drinking alcohol can prevent migraines.

Another useful effect of migraine is: research have suggested that migraine victims are relatively proof against developing alcoholism. This could also be a more intuitive connection than with diabetes, as many individuals with migraines report that they avoid alcohol because it may possibly trigger headaches.

Migraine has presented an evolutionary advantage.

Potential evolutionary advantages of migraine have also been studied. As a rule, conditions that affect a person's function result in poor survival in the long run and eventually lack of traits. And yet, after hundreds of thousands of years, migraine lives and thrives.

Several evolutionary explanations have been postulated. One is that migraines may very well develop as a protective alarm system against toxins entering the body. Avoiding the usage of toxic substances because they cause headache may improve health and evolutionary advantage, in comparison with individuals who eat more of such substances without headache and thus suffer undesirable consequences. Migraine as we realize it today arose consequently of over-activity or over-sensitivity of an evolutionarily essential early warning system.

However small the sensible and day-to-day consequences could also be for individuals who suffer its effects, migraines may indeed have a number of silver linings.