Hearty congratulations on your migraine!

Just think about your reduced cardiovascular risk as you seek that comforting shroud of darkness.

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There’s not much to celebrate about having regular migraines, as this Back Pager can attest.  

But one new study suggests that along with the occasional extreme sensitivity to light, visual auras and blinding headaches, you may have better cardiovascular health. 

To put it another way, the better your cardiovascular health, the higher your odds of having migraines, Dutch and German researchers say.  

The new study in JAMA Network Open included more than 140,000 adults with a mean age of 44 who were sent migraine questionnaires every 1.5 to 2.5 years. They were also scored according to the European SCORE2 cardiovascular risk score system, which includes age, cholesterol levels, smoking status, diabetes and systolic blood pressure. 

The surveys found that 18.4% of the participants had prevalent migraine, and 1.9% of the rest of the cohort experienced incident migraine. 

The 15-year study showed that the odds of having prevalent or incident migraine decreased with increasing cardiovascular risk score categories.  

The association was there for both men and women but was “more profound” in women, who made up 58% of participants, the researchers say.  

“These results support the hypothesis that a relatively healthy cardiovascular system increases the probability of having active or developing migraine in the future, especially among women. Sex differences might play a pathophysiological role in the association between migraine activity and vascular health.” 

The researchers noted that migraines were self-reported, running the risk that they were misclassified, and they didn’t know whether the migraines were with aura or without. They also couldn’t distinguish between a history of migraine and active migraine. 

“Further studies should focus on identifying the underlying, possible nonatherosclerotic pathophysiological mechanisms and biomarkers reflecting microvascular dysfunction to improve the prediction of cardiovascular end points in patients with migraine.” 

These findings may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the theory that migraines bring a higher cardiovascular risk along with them. 

For instance, one study in European Heart Journal that found “robust” associations between migraine and cardiovascular risk – particularly migraine with aura and ischaemic stroke – while this paper in The Journal of Headache and Pain found a significant association between migraine and stroke and ischemic heart disease. 

The authors themselves add that migraine headache – especially with aura – is associated with major cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease events. “Although a clinically underappreciated cardiovascular risk factor, migraine is slowly being recognised as such, and has recently been included in a cardiovascular risk prediction score or added to existing prediction models.”  

It’s complicated, the researchers say. “There’s a complex interplay between migraine activity states and vascular health.” 

The new findings may be cold comfort for us migraineurs when we’re hiding under a pillow in a dark room trying not to (pardon the technical word) spew, but we’ll take what we can get. 

Send soothing damp facecloths and story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.