A World of Pain/Gain

Headaches are a painful part of life for everyone, but for a certain percentage of the American population, there’s a whole other dimension to headaches that are so painful, so torturous and excruciating, they can literally leave the sufferer incapacitated.

Fortunately, I don’t happen to be one of these sufferers, but many people I know of experience frequent migraines: harrowing headaches accompanied by nausea, bouts of throwing up and such sensitivity to lights and sounds that not even a darkened, noiseless room frees them from their anguish.

No age, sex or race is immune from migraines. They happen to anyone and everyone. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that over 300 million people across the globe suffer from at least one migraine in their lifetime. But migraineurs, as their called, rarely suffer from just one. In fact, it’s estimated that 38 percent of migraineurs get between one and three migraines a month and 11 percent get between two and six a week!

What explains their prevalence? Scientists can’t be sure, but one thing that appears to be at least associated with migraine frequency is being overweight, particularly among children.

Doctors from The Headache Center (yes, that’s an actual place) at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center analyzed data from over 900 children, about 18 percent of whom were overweight at the study’s outset and an additional 16 percent at risk for becoming overweight. They assessed the children’s weight levels at various stages throughout the study to see what link, if any, there was between weight and migraine activity.

What they found was that among those children who were overweight at the study’s outset, the prevalence and frequency of those migraines correlated with the weight gained or lost over the length of the study – the heavier they were, the more frequent the migraines; as weight was lost, the less frequent the migraines (children were weighed at the beginning of the study, at the three-month mark, and at the end of the study, which was the six-month mark).

“The association suggests some physiological or environmental processes that are common to both conditions [obesity and migraines],” said the study’s lead researcher and author, Dr. Andrew Hershey, director of Cincinnati’s Headache Center.

As you might be able to gather from Hershey’s comments, the link between obesity and migraines are correlated with one another, which doesn’t mean that obesity causes migraines (As I’ve written in the past, correlation does not imply causation). But given the fact that obesity is linked to many other health hazards – from heart disease, to diabetes, from breast cancer to colon cancer – it’s at the very least reasonable to believe that obesity and migraines are linked.

Thus, just as the researchers of the study say, a child’s weight ought to be taken into consideration in assessing what treatments are best for child migraine sufferers. Perhaps the best medication he or she can take is a double dose of exercise.