About 6 percent of men and 18 percent of women between the ages of 25 to 55 suffer from migraine headaches. Migraines are usually only on one side of the head and may be associated with nausea. Many migraine sufferers have transformed migraine, a pattern where occasional or episodic headaches become chronic, with a near-daily frequency. Previous studies suggest that poor sleep habits are common in women with transformed migraines. Now research reports that improving sleep behaviors can reduce the frequency and intensity of transformed migraines.
The study, presented at the 48th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Headache Society in Los Angeles, examined the effects of behavioral sleep modifications on transformed migraine patients. Researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill assigned 23 women with transformed migraine to a behavior modification group and 20 women with transformed migraine to a control group. The behavior modification group was instructed to spend eight hours in bed each night, not to read, watch television or listen to music in bed, to limit their fluid intake two hours before bedtime, use visualization to fall asleep quickly, and schedule dinner four hours before bedtime. The women in the control group were instructed to eat dinner at a consistent time each night, perform acupressure to a point that had no association to headache, and do five minutes of exercise every morning. The participants recorded their headaches in standardized diaries and stayed on preventive medication. The participants received two follow-up visits, with the first follow-up at six weeks.
The researchers found that after the first follow-up visit, the behavior-modification group had a 29 percent reduction in headache frequency and 40 percent reduction in headache intensity, compared with those who didn't change their sleep habits. The control group participants were then switched to the behavior modification group. After the second follow-up visit, 58% of the original behavior-modification group reverted from chronic headaches to episodic and 43 percent of the switched control group reverted.
"We found that beneficial changes in sleep habits were associated with reduction in headache frequency and severity and with reversion to episodic migraine," says researcher Anne Calhoun, MD, associate professor at the UNC School of Medicine, in a news release. "Therefore, behavioral sleep modification appears to be an effective treatment for transformed migraine when coupled with standard medical care."
REFERENCES:
1. Improving sleep behaviors reduces frequency and intensity of headaches, UNC study shows. UNC News Release, June 23, 2006:
http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun06/migraine062206.htm
Posted by Elaine Gavalas on September 22, 2006 02:58 PM
