Many times, headache attacks occur at the same time of the day repeatedly, and this is not a strange case for you alone, as scientists have found that there are strong links between the biological clock and headache attacks, according to a recent study.
The study, published recently in the Medical Journal of the American Academy of Neurology, included a statistical analysis of all available studies on cluster and migraine headaches that included circadian features.
Cluster headaches that occur in cyclical patterns, or cluster periods, are one of the most painful types of headaches. They usually wake you up in the middle of the night with severe pain in or around one eye on one side of your head.
As for a migraine, it may cause pulsating pain, usually limited to one side of the head, and is often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and excessive sensitivity to light and sound.
Migraine attacks can cause severe pain for hours or days, and their severity can interfere with your daily activities.
What did the researchers find?
Study author Dr. Mark Joseph Borich of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center and a member of the American Academy of Neurology said in exclusive statements to Sky News Arabia:
– We have noticed that many patients with cluster headaches and migraines begin to experience headaches around the same time of day.
– Other researchers have made the same observation as us, but not all of the data has been reviewed before, so we reviewed and analyzed all the English-language studies we could find on the links between the circadian clock and cluster and migraine disorder.
We examined behavioral features, such as the co-occurrence of headache with the urge to wake up.
We also looked at anatomical features such as where in the brain headache genes are located.
The analysis also included a review of molecular features such as levels of melatonin (a hormone responsible for regulating biorhythms in both humans and animals), to see how it relates to this headache.
Finally, we found that both cluster and migraine headaches have links to the circadian rhythm at the behavioral, anatomical and molecular levels.
We found that more than 70 percent of cluster headache patients and about half of migraine patients experience headaches at around the same time every day.
For patients with cluster headaches, headaches usually occur in the middle of the night, while migraine attacks usually occur during the day.
We found that melatonin levels were lower in both migraine and cluster headache patients.
We also found that some essential circadian genes, the genes that determine our 24-hour cycle, are directly linked to cluster and migraine headaches.
Next step
The researchers believe that the results of the study are applicable to a wide range of patients around the world, given that this data is a summary of many other research studies across North America, Europe and Asia.
The study also opens new horizons towards improving headache treatments in the future, as understanding the existence of a link between headache and the biological clock will help in developing treatments that target the timing of headache occurrence, and thus prevent it, but this depends on a deeper understanding of this link better.
With that in mind, Borich says, “Our next step is to start connecting the behavioral, anatomical and molecular features that we found in the study. For example, if we can find a gene or a region in the brain that causes the behavioral timing of headaches, then we have something we can target to see what.” If only we could prevent headaches.”
