Smoking May Cause Migraines
June 24, 2009 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
If you’re a smoker and you get migraines, a study that appeared in the most recent issue of the Journal of Headache and Pain may be of interest to you. Researchers from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology found that smokers had more migraine attacks than non-smoking migraineurs and that as few as five cigarettes per day triggered migraines.
Interestingly, not much has been studied about cigarettes and migraines. Some researchers believed that smoking could work to ease migraine pain if smokers found smoking to be relaxing. But this study used medical students as their subjects, who knew what migraines were, and the researchers focused on the number of cigarettes smoked.
The researchers looked t 361 medical students, their history of migraine and smoking habits, if they were smokers. Sixteen percent of the students had migraines. When looking at the percentage of people who had migraines and who smoked, the researchers found that there were more smokers in the migraine group (29%) than in the the general group (20% of all the students together).
The researchers also found that the migraines most often set in after five cigarettes were smoked within one day.
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