LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Prevention Of Migraines

Will Your Infant Develop Migraines? 2 Things to Look For

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My near-mantra is that migraines are not a problem in the head. Rather, these headaches are a sign that something is wrong with your overall health. The evidence supporting this position is plentiful and some of this research can be found in a recent blog post that refers to migraines as a “progressive brain disorder.”

While migraines can begin at any age, it is not unusual to have them start as a toddler.  I recently had a patient whose migraines began as early as 2 years of age.  As a parent, I can think of few things more achingly painful than watching your innocent child suffer the debilitating pain of a migraine while all you can do is watch helplessly.  No wonder some parents who seek help from pediatric neurologists resort to neurotransmitter-altering medications given at a time when the brain is undergoing some of the most dramatic changes of his or her lifespan.

But what if there is another answer? What if there was an early warning sign that something was wrong with your little one’s system?

What if you could change it THEN, possibly derailing the chance that your small child will suffer with migraines?

As you can guess, I wouldn’t bring this up unless there was an answer.

This particular study looks at the relationship between an infant who experienced infantile colic and his or her later risk of developing chronic migraine headaches. Here’s what they found:

  • Children with migraine were 661% more likely to have had infantile colic.
  • If the child had migraine without aura the risk was still massive at 701%.
  • Migraine with aura 573% .
  • However, this association was not present with tension-type headaches.

In other words, somewhere there is an incredibly strong connection between infantile colic and migraines. There are several mechanisms that might explain the association.

One possible explanation is that the gut produces a very high level of neurotransmitters, which is why the gut is frequently referred to as the “second brain.”  An alteration in the production of these neurotransmitters in the gut could clearly affect brain function.

As an example, 2/3 of the body’s serotonin comes from the gut.  When the gut is inflamed, it will produce even more serotonin.  This could result in the infant’s brain being bathed in an unnaturally high level of serotonin, resulting in a lifetime of a sort of serotonin deficency. Serotonin clearly has an influence on the brain and some migraine medications (like amytriptaline) are used to treat migraines.

The other explanation can start with a personal story.  When my little Keegan was an infant, he experienced colic. As any parent can tell you, colic can be heartbreaking and frustrating, especially in the middle of the night when the parent is going on virtually no sleep.

While most cases of colic are said to last about 3 months, Keegan’s was handled in about 4 weeks through a combination of probiotics, a visit to a pediatric chiropractor and cutting dairy out of mom’s diet while she continued to nurse.

Food allergies.

There is absolutely NO doubt that food allergies can contribute to chronic migraine headaches.  The changes made for Keegan were designed to shift his immune system back into balance (probiotics for Th1 stimulation, allergen avoidance to tone down Th2 pathways).  An altered immune system can produce inflammation that is bad for the brain and bad for the blood vessels leading to the brain.

This study can give us further insight into what might cause migraines later in life. It may be that, in those who suffer from chronic migraine headaches AND had infantile colic, the identification and avoidance of food allergies and calming any inflammation in the gut may be a critical piece to the puzzle of solving migraine headaches for you or someone you care about.

Chronic Migraine Headaches as a Progressive Brain Disorder?

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chronic migraines as a progressive brain disorder
Chronic migraines as a progressive brain disorder

Sounds like a scary title, huh? Good, because if you suffer from migraines, you NEED to understand how serious this truly is.

And it is not about controlling the headache.  Although this may be the immediate need, this limited approach does nothing for protecting your brain.  And make no mistake–migraine sufferers have a greatly increased risk for things like heart disease, stroke and dementia.  Masking the headache with medication does not change your increased risk–it’s still going to happen unless you do something about it.

The current research on migraines follow two related pathways:  mitochondrial dysfunction and vascular dysfunction.  Both share aspects in common, but the best thing is that lifestyle changes to improve one also effects the other.  Here’s the basics.

The mitochondrial dysfunction model begins with, shockingly, the mitochondria.  Think way back to your high school biology class and the anatomy of a cell when you first learned about the mitochondria.  The little “powerhouse of the cell.”  That little organelle within the cell that helps to generate energy for a cell.  And the “energy currency” for every cell is adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.  There are some billion or so reactions that occur in our body EVERY SECOND, and each one of these requires a molecule of ATP to get the job done.  Some tissues, like fat, use very little energy.  Others, like the heart, our muscles and our brain, use much more.  At rest, the nervous system, which includes our brain, is the greatest utilizer of ATP in the body.  Once we start moving, the muscles take over and have the greatest need.

Imagine that.  As you sit here reading this, your brain is requiring mass amounts of energy just to process the information.  So what does this mean?  It means that each cell of the nervous system requires thousands of mitochondria just to generate the energy needed for a brain cell just to perform its basic functions.  And each of these mitochondria are little factories churning out ATP for the brain cell to use at an enormous rate.  Evidence has been present for several decades that the protection and nutritional support of the mitochondria needs to be an integral part of avoiding, reducing the severity of and reducing the long-term ramifications of migraines and seizures.

With this model, anything that harms the mitochondria and interferes with a brain cell’s ability to make energy will contribute to chronic migraine headaches.  Anything that helps the mitochondria can provide chronic migraine relief.

In the vascular dysfunction model, problems with the blood vessels, especially the very tiny blood vessels that feed the tissues of the brain, lead to the headaches.  Imagine the flow through a blood vessel becoming rapidly choked off or the flow at least becoming more turbulent and restricted.  The brain cells that depend on this blood flow are going to get pretty pissed off when it is cut off.  With this model, an anti-cardiovascular disease lifestyle is the best option.  Ironically, this lifestyle will also improve mitochondrial dysfunction.

With either model, typical medications used to treat migraine headaches do not fix anything.  And yet most of the migraine-oriented websites and online communities are still funded by drug companies and never promote real discussions about underlying pathology or how to improve brain function.  Without this open conversation about these two models of migraine headaches, migraine sufferers will continue to be at long term risk of cognitive decline, stroke and heart disease.  This particular article delves into the concept that chronic migraine headaches are a progressive brain disorder and should be addressed as such.

We need to wake up and start to realize that migraines CAN be improved or cured with the right lifestyle changes.

Migraines in Children: How Well Do Meds Work?

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Few things are as difficult as seeing your child in pain. I remember when Keegan broke his leg and how much it hurt me knowing he hurt.

Headaches in children can be just as unbearable for a parent, but with the added concern of whether something more ominous is causing the headaches. While misguided, most parents will present to his or her pediatrician for evaluation and some type of answer. This usually prompts imaging of the brain despite the absence of red flags.  MRI if you are lucky, CT scans if your pediatrician wouldn’t recommend a medical journal if he or she got whacked upside the head with it.

Side note: In the absence of red flags, advanced imaging is not recommended.  Even when imaging should be done, it should be an MRI (with the single exception of looking for a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is much more likely to occur in the elderly population). The radiation exposure with a CT scan is extremely high and has been linked to some 29,000 cancers per year.

So everything comes back normal, but your little baby is still having nightmare headaches. It’s nice to know there is nothing “real” going on, but this doesn’t take care of the migraine headaches. Your pediatrician’s only answer at this point is medication.

It is unfortunate, but a referral to a chiropractor is rarely undertaken before the medication. Many of the kids who come into our office for treatment of his or her headaches have already tried everything including medications. Most often we are able to help in a very short period of time, although there have been cases over the years that treatment in our office was not able to help and we just became one more therapy in a long list of failed attempts.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that we do extremely well with headaches. However, our comprehensive approach (manipulation, soft tissue work, diet, stress management) to migraines in children has not been studied in any type of clinical trial that I’m aware of, so maybe I could understand a pediatrician’s reluctance to refer out to a chiropractor. After all, we don’t want to subject our children to anything that has no research to back it up, right?

Which, of course, brings us to this particular study.  Basically, researchers looked across multiple studies to see which medications have been shown to be effective for the treatment of migraines in children. Here’s what they found:

  • Topiramate (Topamax) led to 0.7 less headache days per month.
  • Trazodone was slightly less effective at 0.6 less headache days per month.
  • Drugs with no benefit included clonidine, flunarizine, pizotifen, propranolol, and valproate (Depakote).
  • A single trial of fluoxetine for chronic daily headaches found it ineffective.
  • However, kids given placebo experienced an almost 50% drop in headache days (down 2.7 days / month).

Basically, the evidence sucks for the use of most medications for treatment of migraines in children.

Placebo, on the other hand, plays a far, far stronger role in slashing headache frequency in the children in these studies. Something to consider strongly should your pediatrician recommend medications (with a long list of side effects) to help control migraines in children.

It also brings us back to the use of a comprehensive chiropractic approach to the treatment of headaches in children. Our care is extremely safe when compared to any medication, and, at least according to this review, it certainly couldn’t be any less effective!

Chronic Migraine Relief Begins…HERE?

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migrane headaches and gluten linked
Migrane headaches and gluten linked

You suffer from headaches and have been searching for some type of chronic migraine relief; so your PCP should send you to a neurologist, right?

It sounds like a great place to start.  After all, your headache is in your head and deals with your nervous system, right?  If you’ve been reading the Rantings for any time now, you understand how flawed this method of thinking is.  Migraines may be felt in the head, but they are really a problem with your entire body.  Something is wrong, and your body is screaming at you to fix it in the loudest way possible.

If this is the case, it certainly makes medicating a headache without finding the root cause shortsighted, if not downright dangerous.  Dangerous because, in those who experience migraines (particularly with aura and in women), there is an increased risk for things like stroke and heart disease.  Merely treating the headache with medications does not lower this increased risk.

So what does all this have to do with this particular study?

There is a well established relationship between food allergies and neurological problems, most notably wheat allergies to gluten.  The list is quite long, but does include seizures, which I have written in a previous blog article that can be read by clicking here.

Given that I’ve written a book on the relationship between migraines and seizures, it should come as no big shocker to you that, if gluten is related to seizures, it just might be related to chronic migraines headaches as well.

Researchers looked at patients with gluten sensitivity and inflammatory bowel disease to see how many of them experienced headaches.  Here’s what they found:

  • Celiac disease led to a 379% higher risk of experiencing headaches.
  • Gluten sensitivity led to a whopping 953% increased risk of migraine headaches (Tweet this).
  • For inflammatory bowel disease, there was an increased risk of 266%.
  • 72% of celiac disease subjects graded their migraine as severe.
  • 30% of IBD graded their migraines as severe.
  • 60% of GS rated his or her headache as severe.

These are some very strong associations.  Strong enough so that any physician treating a patient with migraines should be asking about diet and, more specifically, gluten intake.  If they do not, and the first recommendations are medications, it’s probably time to run the other way.  It would be a strong indication that the physician does not stay current with medical literature.  This is not someone I would want taking care of my brain.

If you suffer from migraines, have you tried a gluten free diet?  If so, did it seem to help?