By: Diana Barnes-BrownA study recently published in the journal Neurology has confirmed suspicions that women who take oral contraceptives have increased risk of suffering from migraines and non-migraine headaches.
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Quick Migraine Facts
The National Headache Foundation reports that migraines affect roughly 28 million people in the United States.
Migraines affect more women than men, and roughly 25 percent of female sufferers experience between one and four attacks per month.
Migraines can occur for a few hours or may last for up to several days.
The symptoms of migraines vary for each sufferer, but always include one or more of the following: throbbing, one-sided pain in the head; sensitivity to light, sound, heat or cold; visual disturbances or difficulty; confusion and nausea or vomiting.
While migraines can be debilitating, there is help. Changes in lifestyle, medications, and traditional healing arts such as acupuncture, nutritional or naturopathic remedies or combinations of multiple methods have all been found helpful by some sufferers.
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The study was conducted by Dr. Karen Aegidius and colleagues at the Norwegian National Headache Center in Trondheim. Aegidius, also the study’s lead author, reported that many women already suffer from migraines during their menstrual periods, when levels of the hormone estrogen naturally drop. Oral contraceptives, which work by changing the levels of reproductive hormones in the body, can intensify these headaches. Such pills can raise estrogen levels up to four times those of women who use other forms of birth control, resulting in a particularly intense estrogen crash around menstruation which researchers hypothesized may be related to headache frequency.
To conduct the study, Aegidius and her research team looked at health data from 13,944 women who took part in Norway’s Nord-Trondelag Health Study. The women who were included had responded to both a series of questions on oral contraceptives and a series on headaches.
Among women who took oral contraceptives, migraines were 40 percent more common. Non-migraine headaches were also more common among those who took oral contraceptives, occurring 20 percent more frequently than among those who used alternate types of birth control. However, there was no link found between headaches and the level of hormones in particular types of pills.
Aegidius pointed out that because both oral contraceptive use and the presence of headaches were recorded at the same time, it is not yet possible to think of the relationship between the two factors as causal – it may be that certain cofactors influence both oral contraceptive use and headaches, or that women who get more headaches are more likely to elect or be recommended to take the pill.
In the event further research confirms that the use of oral contraceptives leads to an increase in headaches, there are several things that could be done to reduce or alleviate these negative side effects.
For example, patients could use an estrogen patch for a couple of days before their periods in order to make the estrogen drop more gradual. Another option would be for women to continuously take the hormone portions of the pill packet for three months at a time, so that menstruation would occur only four times a year rather than once a month. Also, Mircette, one brand of low-dose oral contraceptives, makes the pills with gradually decreasing estrogen levels in the days leading up to menstruation, which would likely have a similar effect to that of the estrogen patch method.
