New research suggests something that many women have known to be true, that migraines intensify during menopause.
"In women who have migraine, headaches increase by 50 to 60 percent when they go through the perimenopause and menopausal time periods," Doctor Vincent Martin, professor of medicine and co-director of the Headache and Facial Pain Program at the University of Cincinnati, told HealthDay.
"[The new finding] basically confirms what women have been telling us physicians for decades. We finally have some evidence," Martin said.
The perimenopausal period can last several years before actual menopause sets in, and is characterized by irregular periods, trouble sleeping, and even hot flashes.
To make their findings the researchers surveyed 3,600 women between the ages of 35 and 65 about their menopausal status and their history of and current struggle with migraines. The women were labeled as having high frequency headaches if headache days occurred 10 or more times a month.
The women were divided into "premenopausal, perimenopausal and postmenopausal" groups, HealthDay reported. About eight percent of the premenopausal group had frequent headaches, 12.2 percent of the perimenopausal group and 12 percent of the menopausal women got them.
The researchers were puzzled by these statistics because premenopausal women often suffer from migraines right before and during their menstrual cycle.
"Women with migraine are most likely to get them a couple days before bleeding through the first few days of the cycle, when estrogen and progesterone both fall. The idea that women who have fewer periods [during perimenopause] would get more migraines seems paradoxical," study researcher Dr. Richard Lipton, director of the Montefiore Medical Center Headache Center and professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine told HealthDay.
The researchers believe dropping estrogen levels are responsible for the migraines in both cases.
"I think this study is particularly valuable because they went to the trouble of carefully determining what phase the women were in," Doctor Elizabeth Loder, chief of the division of headache and pain in the department of neurology at Brigham & Women's Hospital, told HealthDay.
