Migranes were linked to an increased risk for Bell's Palsy in a new study published in Neurology.
A team of researchers used data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) to form two groups of patients aged 18 years and older. All of the patients in one group were diagnosed with migraine (migraine with aura, migraine without aura, and migraine unspecified) from January 2005 to December 2009. In the second group the patients matched controls without migraine or other headache extracted from a random sample in NHIRD.
Each group consisted of 136,704 people.
To measure patients the researchers used propensity score matching, which included 136,704 participants in each of the migraine and control cohorts.
After 3 1/2 years into the study researchers found that 671 persons in the migraine group and 365 in the control group were newly diagnosed with Bell's palsy.
The results show that migraineurs with more clinic visits for migraine were more likely to develop Bell's palsy, Dr. Shuu-Jiun Wang, the lead author in the study, said to Medscape.
"In clinical practice, in addition to hypertension, diabetes, and pregnancy, migraine history should be traced in patients with Bell's palsy," Wang said to Medscape. He added that this medical phenomenon is especially important in young people because they usually don't have hypertension or diabetes.
Although Wang was admittedly surprised by the results, he and his colleagues had previously found and reported that patients who suffer from migraines have a higher chance of developing sudden sensorineural hearing loss related to the eighth cranial nerve, or the cochlear nerve, reported Medscape.
"So we thought that we might have a chance to demonstrate the association between migraine and Bell palsy," Wang told Medscape.
Wang performed this study with his colleagues Kuan-Po Peng, Yung-Tai Chen, Jong-Ling Fuh, and Chao-Hsiun Tang.
