Key Points
Patients will often say that they can predict the weather, says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center at University of Cincinnati and president of the US National Headache Foundation..
Martin has researched the impact of temperature and other weather conditions on migraines, and he believes the climate crisiswhich brings warming temperatures and more extreme weather eventscould worsen the disease..
I think [climate change] is going to have an enormous effect on migraine, he says.. This summer, Martin and his colleagues presented a study that reviewed over 70,000 daily diary records of 660 migraine patients and cross-referenced them with regional weather data, such as wind speed, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure..
The review found that while the prevalence of migrainesmeaning the number of people who get themhas stayed around the same in the US over the past 30 years, migraine-related disabilitywhich is determined by how much time patients lose for work and socializing due to migraineshas mushroomed.. Cohen and his coauthors discovered that the number of people reporting migraine-related disability had almost doubled by some measures..
Anna Andreou, the director of headache research at the Wolfson Sensory, Pain, and Regeneration Centre at Kings College London, says we have enough evidence to suggest that climate change makes it worse for the migraine sufferers..
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Researchers link hot weather with increased headaches for people with migraines
16, Jun, 24Researchers cross-referenced 71,030 daily diary records of 660 migraine patients with regional weather data and found that for every temperature increase of 0.12 degrees Celsius, there was a 6 per cent increase in the occurrence of...