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Ah, menstruation—giver of stained underwear, unrelenting cramps, and for some individuals, migraine assaults. If you are feeling a vice-grip round your cranium proper across the time your uterus decides it’s time for a deep cleansing, it’s in all probability not a coincidence.
“Menstruation is a very common trigger of migraine attacks in women,” Addie Peretz, MD, medical assistant professor within the division of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, tells SELF. Migraine is a posh neurological situation that primarily makes your mind actually delicate to sure triggers, which might result in painful (and doubtlessly debilitating) assaults. For some individuals, migraine triggers embody sure meals, an absence of sleep, or stress. For others, the drop in estrogen that happens proper earlier than their interval begins can convey on an assault, she says.
If you have got menstrual migraine assaults, you already know they actually suck. “Migraine attacks associated with menstruation tend to last longer, be more disabling, and are less treatment-responsive than non-menstrual migraine attacks,” Dr. Peretz says.
So, what are you able to do about it? Menstrual migraine therapy might be damaged up into three normal buckets: acute therapy, for while you’ve already bought a migraine and are attempting to get reduction; mini preventive therapy, which focuses on stopping a migraine within the days earlier than your cycle; and steady preventive therapy, which may be applicable when you have assaults at different factors in the course of the month or in case your migraines aren’t responding to mini prevention.
“The overall goal is to decrease the intensity and the frequency of the migraine attacks so they have as little impact on your day-to-day functioning as possible. That’s a universal goal of migraine treatment, but especially true during the menstrual cycle,” Mason Dyess, DO, a neurologist and headache drugs specialist at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, tells SELF.
Ready to get some reduction? Here’s what you are able to do—as a result of PMS is already unhealthy sufficient by itself.
Track your menstrual cycle and your migraine signs.
It’s essential to determine precisely when in your cycle you’re experiencing migraine assaults, how unhealthy they are usually, and whether or not they’re additionally taking place outdoors of your interval week. “Being able to pick up on patterns about when your migraine attacks are happening most often during the month is extremely powerful for headache providers,” Dr. Dyess says. “That can help us get a treatment strategy together that’s uniquely crafted to you and your triggers.”
Consider monitoring your menstrual cycle and headache cycle, whether or not that’s with a bodily calendar, a interval app, or the Notes app in your cellphone. The sky’s the restrict for a way a lot info you’ll be able to document, however there are a number of key issues to cowl. “At a minimum, I would suggest tracking whether you had a headache each day, the severity of the pain, whether you took medication to alleviate your pain, and when your period started and ended,” Dr. Peretz says. This might help you and your physician verify if assaults coincide with typical hormone dips throughout your month-to-month cycle.
If you want contraception, some contraception might help scale back menstrual migraine signs.
Since a change in estrogen ranges can set off a migraine assault, one technique is to attempt to decrease that hormonal dip. If that is the case for you, the tablet, vaginal ring, patch, and different hormonal contraceptives could assist change your migraine patterns. “Some patients go on birth control to make their menstrual cycles more predictable, or to eliminate them, which can sometimes reduce overall migraine burden,” Dr. Dyess explains.
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