United States – Among U.S. women who experience migraine, it is found that a third claims that migraine is regularly coinciding with periods, confirmed by the survey result.
Suppose migraines that come during the menstrual period are too frequent and excruciating. However, only about five percent of individuals use drugs for issue alleviation, as reported by HealthDay.
Call for Improved
“If you have migraines related to your menstrual cycle, discuss this with your gynecologist or neurologist. There are treatments that can help, and if the first treatment tried does not work, do not give up,” said study lead author Dr. Jessica Ailani. She’s a professor of clinical neurology at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
The recent study was financed by Pfizer that is the manufacturer of migraine drug. The data will be featured Tuesday during the American Academy of Neurology annual meeting, in Denver.
Ailani and his team analyzed information from the 2021 U.S. National Health and Wellness Survey, which was taken by adult women with headaches.
Menstrual Migraines
The researchers concluded that one-third of women were of the opinion that their headaches had often occurred during the menstruation period. In greater than 50% of these instances (52.5%), the women were premenopausal.
Among them, migraines tended to occur often during menstruation, with the average monthly headache days amounting to 8.4 days. One-third of those women complained of their headache severity as moderate to severe.
Most women tried to deal with the attacks as they came their way using, for instance over, over-the-counter remedies (about 42%) and prescription meds (about 49%).
What brings Ailani’s group to attention is that only 21% of women who use drugs aimed at preventing migraines were within their group, they pointed out.
“In my opinion, this is because preventive therapy is a long-term commitment by both a woman and her clinician to improving the disease process,” she said in a Georgetown news release. “Migraine is a lifelong brain disease without a cure, and the goal of preventive therapy is to reduce disease burden and improve quality of life. Unfortunately, newer disease-specific treatments are costly, so generic older treatments are often used and come with greater side effects.”
Ailani reveals that the majority of women with migraine try to put up with the pain, and there is no headache specialist that they have consulted.
“As a headache specialist in the U.S., I know I can do better for women in my clinic, but what can be done for the millions of women who don’t get into a headache clinic? That is our true next step,” she said, as reported by HealthDay.
The fact that such discoveries will be given at a medical meeting is enough to make us consider them preliminary until they are published in a peer-reviewed journal.