New research involving doctors at the University of Cincinnati shows there's a connection between specific types of weather patterns and headaches. It's an exciting finding for millions of Americans who suffer from chronic headaches and migraines.
Vincent Martin, MD, co-director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center at UC's Gardner Neuroscience Institute, notes patients have long identified weather and weather changes as the cause of their headaches or migraines. However, research up until now has mainly focused on individual variables, such as precipitation or barometric change.
Martin and Brinder Vig, MD, co-director of UC's Division of Headache Medicine in the Department of Neurology and Rehab Medicine, are co-authors on a joint study between UC, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Errex Inc. and Teva Pharmaceuticals. The findings were presented June 4-7 at the American Headache Society Annual Scientific Meeting.
They say these findings prove weather is a factor, and more specifically, which types of weather are to blame.
Certain weather patterns trigger headache
Researchers analyzed weather patterns in the Northeast U.S. and identified two specific patterns that showed higher risk of new-onset headaches:
- an approaching cold front, or low-pressure system, with precipitation, which can occur in any seasons.
- a Bermuda High, a high-pressure system that heavily dictates summer weather across the eastern half of the U.S.
"We used machine learning to find different weather patterns for about four years of data, and we did find actually six (total) weather patterns," Vij says. "Four of those were not actually significantly associated with new-onset headache, which is what we looked for in this study. So we did look at other patterns, but they were not significant."
Further research is needed to see how these two weather patterns affect people living at different latitudes and other locations.
"The takeaway, first, is to validate that weather does trigger headaches," says Martin. "New-onset headache was about 70% more likely with these approaching low pressure systems, which is a massive increased risk for headaches."
Headache treatments
Vij says hope is another takeaway.
"This is the first study ever which showed that something could be done to prevent headaches (with migraine prevention medication). This gives a lot of hope to people who are suffering with migraine, and sometimes they feel that are helpless because weather you can't control."
The study looked specifically at Teva Pharmaceutical's drug Ajovy, or generically, fremanezumab.
It found at least six months of treatment with fremanezumab significantly reduced the rate of new-onset headaches compared with no medication across all weather patterns, including conditions considered high risk for new headache onset.
"We saw the weather and headache relationship wiped out with the use of this medication,” says Fred Cohen, MD, a co-investigator and faculty member at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in a release. "We started to notice its effectiveness as early as one month after the start of the medication."
Theoretically, Martin adds, that means patients could be able to predict headaches and head them off.
"Now you can get these apps that can predict changes in barometric pressure and precipitation, often up to a week in the future, ... you could, theoretically, use some targeted migraine therapies that begin maybe a day before this would occur and continue them for two or three days, (and) that might mitigate, reduce, or maybe even eliminate a headache occurring with (a) particular trigger factor," he says.
Previous research, Martin says, also showed the same drug — fremanezumab — helped prevent new-onset headaches caused by high temperatures.
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