20 posts tagged with "Research"

For most of the twentieth century, migraine prevention ran on borrowed drugs. Blood pressure medications, antidepressants, anti-seizure drugs — all discovered to help migraine by accident, none designed for it. The triptans, arriving in the 1990s, were the first real exception: purpose-built for migraine from the serotonin-receptor work of the preceding decade. But they treated attacks already underway, and on the prevention side the borrowed-drug era continued.

That changed over the past decade, and by 2025 the shape of the field looked genuinely different — the first preventives designed specifically for migraine, a second acute drug class for people triptans never suited, and a deeper pipeline behind both than migraine research has ever had. This is a look at what changed, what it means in practice, and where the work is heading next.

Every June, Migraine Awareness Month arrives with a simple, stubborn goal: to get people to take migraine seriously. That may sound obvious for a condition that affects roughly a billion people worldwide, but migraine remains widely misunderstood, frequently dismissed as "just a headache," and chronically under-treated. Awareness Month exists to push back on all three.

Whether you live with migraine yourself, love someone who does, or simply want to understand it better, it's worth knowing what the awareness effort is really about — and what the science actually says. This is a chance to replace stigma with facts.

If you've read much about migraine treatment, you've bumped into serotonin whether the articles named it or not. The most important acute migraine drugs — the triptans — are built around it, the newer gepants and preventive antibodies grew out of the same research lineage, and a lot of trigger folklore (chocolate, sleep, hormones) circles back to it. Serotonin is, in a real sense, the molecule the modern understanding of migraine is organized around.

That doesn't mean migraine is simply "low serotonin," a phrase that gets thrown around and oversimplifies a genuinely intricate story. This is a plain-language tour of what serotonin actually does in a migraine brain, why it matters for treatment, and how it connects to the everyday triggers you can feel.

Gluten has become one of the most talked-about foods in the migraine world, and the conversation is unusually polarized. Some people swear that cutting gluten transformed their attacks; others quietly go gluten-free for months and notice nothing. Both experiences can be true, because the honest answer to "does gluten cause migraines" is: it depends on who you are.

For most people who get migraines, gluten is not a trigger. But for a specific subgroup — people with celiac disease or non-celiac gluten sensitivity — there is a real, research-backed link worth taking seriously. This piece separates those cases so you can figure out which group you're in without needlessly banning bread.

If you've searched for migraine relief online, you've probably run into the daith piercing — a small ring through the innermost fold of cartilage in your ear, promoted as a way to reduce or even end chronic migraines. The idea has spread largely through personal testimonials, and some of them are genuinely glowing.

It's an appealing story: a one-time, relatively cheap procedure that promises to fix a problem powerful medications often can't. But appealing stories deserve careful scrutiny, especially when they involve a permanent hole in your body. Here's what the evidence really shows, why the testimonials are so persuasive, and what to weigh before booking one.

Light and sound sensitivity get most of the attention, but there's a third sense that migraine can hijack: smell. During an attack, perfumes, cooking odors, cleaning products, and cigarette smoke can become overwhelming, nauseating, or even painful. This is osmophobia, and while it's talked about less, it's a meaningful part of many people's migraine experience.

Osmophobia has an interesting quirk that sets it apart from the other sensory symptoms: it's unusually specific to migraine. That makes it worth understanding — both for managing your attacks and, sometimes, for helping pin down what kind of headache you're dealing with in the first place.

Artificial food coloring is a popular villain. It's synthetic, it has intimidating names and numbers, and it turns up in exactly the kind of processed foods people already feel uneasy about. So it gets blamed for a long list of ills, migraines included. But when you actually go looking for the evidence that food dyes trigger migraine attacks, you find something more honest and less dramatic than the internet implies: a little signal, a lot of uncertainty, and a strong pull toward over-restriction that isn't well supported.

This is a clear-eyed look at what the research actually shows about food coloring and migraine — including the parts where the honest answer is "we don't really know."

Acupuncture occupies contested ground in migraine care. To skeptics it is a placebo dressed in ancient tradition; to advocates it is a low-risk, drug-free preventive. The truth, as usual, is more interesting than either camp — and there is now a substantial body of research to draw on, because few complementary therapies for migraine have been studied as much.

This review looks at what the evidence actually supports, where the debate genuinely lies, and how to think about acupuncture as one option among several for reducing migraine frequency.

Creatine has spent decades as a gym supplement, but it has been creeping into conversations about brain health — including migraine. The pitch is appealing and not unreasonable: if the migraine brain has an energy problem, and creatine helps cells store and recycle energy, maybe it helps. The honest answer is that the idea is mechanistically plausible and the direct evidence is thin. This piece lays out what we actually know rather than what the supplement marketing implies.

For as long as people have had aching joints, they have claimed they can feel the weather coming. For most of that history, the medical literature treated the claim as folklore. Over the last twenty years that has shifted. Large observational studies, app-based symptom diaries, and a handful of controlled exposure experiments have produced enough signal that "weather sensitivity in arthritis" is no longer a fringe topic.

The picture that emerges is not the dramatic one some patients describe and not the dismissive one some clinicians used to default to. It is more interesting than either.

Menstrual migraine is one of the clearest examples of how hormones can shape headache patterns.

Many people notice that attacks cluster around the days before bleeding starts, the first few days of a period, or other moments when estrogen levels shift quickly. When that pattern repeats month after month, it usually points to hormone-related migraine rather than random bad timing.

Understanding the cycle behind menstrual migraine can make treatment and prevention much more targeted.

Migraine duration is about more than how long your head hurts.

For many people, the pain is only the center of the attack. The full event can begin earlier with subtle warning signs and continue later with brain fog, fatigue, and sensitivity even after the main pain fades. If you want a realistic picture of attack burden, you have to measure the full arc of the migraine.

That broader view often changes how people manage treatment and recovery.

The link between barometric pressure and migraines is one of the most common reasons people start tracking weather data. Many patients say they can feel a storm coming before anyone else notices it.

Research does not show that every migraine is caused by weather. It does show that barometric pressure changes are a real and meaningful trigger for a subset of people with migraine.

If you've noticed headaches arriving before a storm — or felt them lift when the weather clears — you're not imagining it. The question "does barometric pressure cause headaches?" has been studied extensively, and the answer is a well-supported yes, for a significant subset of the population.

Here's what the science actually says, and what it means for you.

Migraine is far more than a bad headache. It's a neurological event that affects your entire body — before pain arrives, during the attack itself, and even after it ends. Understanding migraine symptoms at each stage helps you recognize what's happening, respond earlier, and explain your experience more accurately to doctors and loved ones.

Most people think of migraine as a single event — severe head pain that eventually goes away. But migraine is actually a multi-phase neurological process. Understanding its four distinct stages helps you catch it earlier, respond more effectively, and recover faster.

Here's a complete guide to each stage of a migraine.

If you've ever felt a headache coming on right before a storm, you're not imagining it. Many weather-sensitive people report a distinct link between atmospheric pressure changes and the onset of head pain — and the science backs this up.

So, can barometric pressure cause headaches? The short answer is yes, for a significant portion of the population. Here's what the research shows and what you can do about it.

Migraine is one of the most common and most misunderstood neurological conditions in the world. It affects over 1 billion people globally — yet it's frequently dismissed as "just a bad headache." It's not.

If you're experiencing debilitating head pain, sensitivity to light and sound, nausea, or vision disturbances, understanding what's actually happening in your body is the first step toward managing it effectively.

Weather-related migraine triggers are a common complaint among migraine sufferers, with many reporting that changes in atmospheric pressure can precipitate or worsen their symptoms. In this article, we'll explore the scientific connection between weather changes and migraines, and discuss how you can better manage these triggers.