Less migraine attacks in pregnancy

Less migraine attacks in pregnancy

Women who suffer from migraine often experience marked relief from the symptoms during pregnancy - a phenomenon that has been known for some time and has now been examined more closely by scientists from Kiel and Rostock. At the center of the research interest for the team was the so-called „cortical habituation“, which is the ability of the brain to gradually ignore repetitive sounds (such as the ticking of the alarm clock) so that ultimately no conscious perception takes place - as previous studies have already shown that in many migraine sufferers this ability is diminished.

Because many women of a lessening of pain „in other circumstances“ The researchers wanted to investigate whether this phenomenon might occur through a normalization of cortical habituation in pregnancy - and examined 29 pregnant women, 14 of whom were migraine patients and 28 non-pregnant women, 12 of whom were at the time of the study 12 suffered from migraines. During the examination, the women should focus on tones that they were previously prepared for by a warning sound - the influence of this procedure on the brain activity of the subjects was recorded in parallel by the researchers using EEG (electroencephalography).

After the experiment was carried out in pregnant women only at the 36th week of pregnancy and then again four weeks after delivery, the researchers came to an interesting conclusion: For example, pregnant migraine patients, for whom it was previously very difficult, disturbing resp. „unimportant“ Noise from the second trimester of pregnancy was suddenly able to do so without any problems, and brain activity was identical to that of healthy volunteers - but this had changed again at the second test four weeks after delivery because the typical migraine symptoms had returned instead. According to the team of researchers, the temporary normalization of brain activity is due to the altered hormonal balance during pregnancy, because there are far fewer hormonal fluctuations than usual in this phase - results that could be extremely valuable in the search for new methods of treating migraine headaches. (sb, 22.01.2010)