Migraine Patients – at Risk of Head Injury?

Wait – didn’t you write that the wrong way around? You mean that people with head injury are more likely to develop migraine, right? Not that migraine patients are more likely to get hit in the head! Or — ?

Actually, surprising as it may seem, a recent study published in the British Medical Journal does indeed suggest that migraine may increase your risk of traumatic brain injury – that is, yes, you may be more likely than the average person to get a blow to the head.

The link between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and migraine has been suggested by other studies. Most obviously, yes – if you get a concussion (a type of brain injury), migraine symptoms may develop. But the link is not always clear-cut. Why are certain people more likely to get migraine in cases of TBI? And is there possibly a cause and effect relationship in both directions?

For this study, researchers took medical information that had already been collected in Taiwan, and identified 7267 patients who had received a new diagnosis of migraine between 1996 and 2010. Then they looked at their medical history thereafter to see who would be later diagnosed with TBI. And, of course, they compared that list with people who were not diagnosed with migraine.

(By the way, Taiwan is an excellent place to collect data like this, because of the way the health system works and how data is collected in that country, covering almost all of the population since 1995.)

The result was that people with migraine were statistically more likely to be diagnosed with TBI in the future. The increased risk is not huge, but statistically significant. Migraine patients were 1.78 times more likely to be diagnosed with TBI.

So – time for the big question – why? Could it be that migraine patients are simply more likely to have symptoms from a blow to the head? More likely to see the doctor as those symptoms are more intense for them than for someone else?

That could be, but the researchers in this study had some other suggestions. For example, we know that migraine affects your brain in many ways, especially during an attack. Could a decrease in cognitive function – a loss of the ability to “think clearly”, actually lead to more accidents?

Not only that, migraine may also cause symptoms such as vertigo or dizziness, which naturally would lead to more falls.

Could migraine mean dementia in future years? Some studies suggest that this could be the case for some people. But even if that’s not the case, migraine is also associated with some types of mental illness (not that everyone with migraine has a serious mental illness, but that migraine patients are more likely to also have some types of mental illness). All of these things may, in some cases, lead to more falls or other accidents.

Of course, the question of “why” is really a whole other study. This study simply showed that there may be a cause and effect relationship from migraine to TBI. And that is enough to once again remind us that migraine is a serious condition that should be treated.

You can read the abstract and the full study here: Migraine and traumatic brain injury: a cohort study in Taiwan