"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 corresponding to stroke and heart attack, and psychiatric disorders corresponding to depression and anxiety. What may be good about migraine?

Migraines can prevent type 2 diabetes.

But possibly there's some excellent news. Oh the study Published in JAMA Neurology suggests that, a minimum of in women, having a diagnosis of lively 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 lively 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 shouldn't be simply as a result of probability.

Headache specialists had long observed that diabetes didn't develop as steadily of their migraine patient population as in the overall population, so this finding was not entirely unexpected. The reason for this relationship, though, shouldn't be clear; After all, what may 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 can have to do with CGRP, a protein molecule within the body that's lively 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 helpful effect of migraine is: research have suggested that migraine victims are relatively resistant to 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 might probably 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 tens of millions 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 using 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 comprehend it today arose in consequence 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 many who suffer its effects, migraines may indeed have a number of silver linings.