Living with Migraines: Hectic Life, Proven Treatments and Practical Tips for Relief

What the Studies Miss: Newer Medications and Overlooked Insights

We must remember that migraine is much more than ‘just a headache.’ It is similar to having your head overpowered by severe headaches, vomiting, and an aversion to light and noise if you have ever had one.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Migraines as a Global Health Issue
2. How Hectic Work Life Contributes to Migraines
3. Migraines, Anxiety, and Depression: A Vicious Cycle
4. Key Stressors That Trigger Migraines
5. Let’s Talk Solutions

• Work-Life Balance
• Mental Health and Stress Management

6. What Are the Most Effective Migraine Treatments?

• Triptans: The Superheroes of Migraine Relief
• Alternative Treatment Modalities

7. Practical Tips to Manage Migraines and Reduce Stress

8. What the Data Doesn’t Cover: Limitations of the Study

9. Which Migraine Medications Are Most Helpful?

10. Migraine Study: What Was Investigated?

11. Additional Findings on Migraine Pain Relievers

According to WHO data, nearly 1 billion people worldwide are affected by migraines, and rather than impacting your day, they affect your life. Not being able to meet work schedules, missing social functions, or being unable to deal with a panic attack and manage your own affairs must be all very frustrating.

Here’s something interesting: a study done in Neurology has featured some of the recent treatments for migraines, including the use of triptans for the symptoms. It’s just awesome that science has solutions; however, issues like stress stand as the greatest contributors to migraines. Not any type of stress but rather the stress from one’s workplace that is characterized by high rates of activities.

How Hectic Work Life Contributes to Migraines

Have you ever felt as though the day never comes to an end and you are all but stretched into work? The concept of meetings, emails, and all those deadlines that most employees are exposed to is enough to stress any person. However, the challenges of the new world of work mentioned above are contributing to the emergence of migraines.

Sitting at a desk for hours at a time, looking at a computer screen, missing meals, and struggling to get a good night’s sleep — it’s a cycle that many find takes them directly to migraine country.

Think about it.

When was the last time you even gave yourself a chance to have a proper lunch? Or ate a bowl of cereal instead of binge-watching your favorite show? These small habits are not necessarily all that bad; they accumulate over time. Fatigue and stress levels rise from long working hours, while other vices such as poor sleep and irregular eating disrupt your body’s functioning. Before you know it, you’ve entered a vicious cycle where stress equals migraines and migraines equal stress.

And let’s not forget that migraines are not only a medical problem. They are very much associated with your emotional state. Stress does not merely cause migraines; it escalates migraines from getting worse progressively during the stress period.

Migraines, Anxiety, and Depression: A Vicious Cycle

Here’s where it gets even trickier: migraines don’t come alone. If you leave migraines untreated, mental health will hang itself in your life eventually. Patients who suffer from chronic diseases are at high risk of developing anxiety because they can never predict when the next episode will occur. Depression comes next, bearing in mind that the pain and loneliness of facing migraines will surely affect your mental health.

It is somewhat of a classic catch-22. Migraine headaches may worsen anxiety and depression, and at the same time these mental health disorders may cause migraine headaches. For that matter, research shows that as many as half of all chronic migraine sufferers also have anxiety or depression. But when burnout is chucked in the mix — well, as you have seen, it is easier to understand how the cycle becomes so devastating.

The worst part? It’s also often said that one cannot afford to get sick or take time off for recuperation. People have everyday excuses, such as fear of losing their job or just the feeling of ‘grit and bear it and get over it,’ which are all counterproductive. Changing this process is not only a matter of medication but also addresses the causes of stress, the regiment, and mental health.

Key Stressors That Trigger Migraines

Now just to elaborate a bit more, let me list down what we offer individually as well. Here are some common precursors in migraines that are caused by stress. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Long Work Hours: Availability for work means that little or no time is given for rest because the body stays tense for long periods.
• Poor Sleep Patterns: Lack of sleep disorients your body and should be avoided as it will trigger frequent migraine attacks.
• Work-Related Anxiety: In other words, the pounding in your chest before that important presentation? It can even cause hormonal fluctuations that lead to migraines. Thus, competitions that spur lots of activity may have negative effects on health.
• Inability to Manage Stress: Stress, for its part, if not well handled, may cause migraines to drag on and even result in continued pain.

These are just a few examples, but to get more on how our lifestyles can affect migraines, kindly click here.

Let’s Talk Solutions

Now that we know what’s causing the problem, the question is: what can we do about it? Although this section is not about providing a call to action or a recipe for how to instantly become a powerful public speaker, it would probably be helpful to mention some basic changes. For instance, working women should begin by improving their work-life balance. Make sure you take breaks on a regular basis, always take your meals, and make sure that sleep is part of your schedule.

And do not leave out your mental health. When stress or anxiety is overwhelming, it’s a good idea to speak with a counselor or consider ways to deal with stress, like practicing mindfulness. Lastly, migraines are at least as much mental pain as they are physical pain, or are they?

Often, it can be so helpful to know how stress and migraines relate to mental health so that you can start to take back control. Believe me, your brain will be grateful for it.

What Are the Most Effective Migraine Treatments?

Let’s dive into the big question everyone asks when they’re dealing with migraines: What actually works? In one survey conducted recently, some of the drugs emerged as real game-changers in terms of doing a great job in tackling migraines. These are triptans; ergot and antiemetics are the big names here. If you have not gotten a good result from several attempts, perhaps you will turn to these.

Looking at the rankings of the triptans, eletriptan, zolmitriptan, and sumatriptan were ranked high for their effectiveness. You can probably think of them as the superheroes of migraine relief because they directly treat the causes of the attack: It is important to note that triptans are not simply drugs for eliminating pain; they are formulated for migraines only. If you have not tried these yet, you should discuss it with your doctor.

A Closer Look At Other Treatment Modalities That Are Not Restricted To Taking Of Pills

Now, I understand — for most people, taking a pill, or possibly you tried, and it didn’t cut it for you. Enter other therapies. That’s where other therapies come in. Then you might be wondering why nasal spray, subcutaneous, and even rectal administration methods sound so weird.

These options are most valuable to those with chronic or severe migraines or migraines that begin suddenly (the ones that knock you off your feet). For instance, the nasal sprays administer medicine fast, ideal for a situation where one cannot afford to eat or drink. Oral treatments can also be a lifesaver because injectable treatments do not have to go through the digestive tract at all.

Now I hear the word injection or suppositories as not that comfortable, but when you are fighting a migraine that rendered you inactive, these methods work.

Practical Tips to Manage Migraines and Reduce Stress

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: stress. If you’re not dealing with stress, then the superior medication may feel like you’re only putting a sticking plaster over a sore. Well, how can one manage to keep one’s stress level low while at work, with family, and all the events that arise in life?

Here are a few things that can genuinely help:

• Mindfulness and yoga: I know these sound a bit too like ‘wellness woo,’ but I promise you they do. That means even 10 minutes of breathing deeply will help restore your peace of mind and relieve stress.
• Therapy: If migraines have now become a usual occurrence, counselling about stress or anxiety can work on the causes.
• Migraine tracking apps: Apps such as Migraine Buddy or Canadian Migraine Tracker are a godsend for tracking the triggers. They assist you in realizing that your migraines are always most likely to occur during a certain time of day, for instance, after a wakeup call at night or when you are most occupied — then you can try to avoid such summons and workloads.
• Professional help: There should not be any occasion that can prevent a person from consulting the headache specialist or a neurologist. They have time for you and can tailor your treatment regimen according to your needs.

What the Data Doesn’t Cover: Limitations of the Study

However, the study has provided us with a lot of helpful information, meaning that we cannot say that it presents complete information or concludes that migraines cannot be treated or prevented. First, it did not go much into detail on some of the new drugs, such as gepants and ditans, which seem to work better for patients who do not get relief from triptans.

Another limitation? The authors targeted only those participants who were already interested in using apps to monitor their migraines. That is useful for gathering information, but it completely ignores a significant portion of the population: those who may not have internet access or do not actively engage in their social or online presence.

Still, these gaps don’t take away from the broader takeaway: this simply means that we are increasingly achieving abilities to manage migraines.

Which migraine medications are most helpful?

Triptins triumphed here, and those findings got mined from real-life databases of about 277,000 people with migraines. Migraine headaches can come with throbbing, intense pain, hence anyone undergoing this will possibly be wondering which medicine is likely to provide relief. Triptans came off as being the most beneficial treatment, with one of the drugs in the class being the top recommended.

The research relied on information collected from actual users of My Migraine Buddy, a free smartphone application, which contains over three million entries. A user can use the app to log migraine episodes as well as rate the effectiveness of taken drugs.

Here to explain what the researchers looked at and what they found that anyone with migraines might find useful is Dr. Elizabeth Loder, the professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the chief of the Division of Headache at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Migraine study: what was investigated?

The study done in Neurology involved self-reported questionnaires from roughly 278,000 persons, most of whom were women, who were followed for 6 years to July 2020. Participants describing treatments used for migraine indicated if they found them helpful, somewhat helpful, or unhelpful by using the app.

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Harvard Health Publishing’s Rheumatoid Arthritis: A guide to the practical way of protecting your joints, avoiding the pain, and enhancing the motion. To find out which medications are most useful in treating migraines, the researchers reviewed 25 drugs in seven classes. The next four most reported helpful drug classes were triptans, followed by ergots like dihydroergotamine and the antiemetics such as promethazine, etc. The latter helps to relieve nausea, the other frequent sign of a migraine.

‘I like assessing studies that took place in a real-life environment, and this one is very unique,’ comments Dr. Loder. The findings support current guideline algorithms for managing migraines, where triptans are identified as first-line therapy. “If you were to ask me to draw up a list of the beneficial migraine drugs today, I would come up with a list that is almost similar to what has been determined in this study,” says…

What other findings of the study were there about migraine pain relievers?

Among the medicines taken at least once, ibuprofen, a non-prescription painkiller marketed as Advil and Motrin, dominated the study. Yet, the participant rated it for its helpfulness at only 42% of the occasions. In fact, the most benign-seeming medication, acetaminophen (Tylenol), was actually helpful only 37% of the time. One of the commercially available multi-symptom relief drugs — aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine — also known as Excedrin, succeeded only slightly better than ibuprofen, or in fifty percent of cases.

When researchers compared the helpfulness of other drugs to ibuprofen, they found:

Triptans turned five to six occasions more useful in comparison to ibuprofen. Eighty percent of patients reported migraine relief with AVP-825, the highest-rated drug in the study. 75% of the time, zolmitriptan (Zomig) was useful, and for sumatriptan (Imitrex), it was 72%. In practice, according to Dr. Loder, only the efficiencies of eletriptan are slightly higher compared to other triptans.

Ergots were preferred on a scale 4 times more than ibuprofen.

This shows that in comparison to ibuprofen, antiemetics were 2.5 times as helpful.

Do people take more than one medicine to ease migraine symptoms?

In this study, two-thirds of migraine attacks were treated with just one drug. About a quarter of the study participants used two drugs, and a smaller number used three or more drugs.

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The Joint Pain Relief Workout

Working on your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles exercises for healing. However, the researchers did not determine the timing of when people first took the drugs. And as to anti-nausea medicines, that is, one may wonder whether subjects based their evaluations of usefulness on nausea rather than on a headache, according to Dr. Loder. But it is socially constructive, as for some individuals with migraines, nausea and vomiting are two of the most severe symptoms. However, when that’s true, other preparation forms can do the trick.

Is there a non-pill alternative to controlling migraines?

No. For the headache, people can opt for a nasal or injectable medication of a triptan instead of a pill. Pre-filled syringes, which are inserted in the thigh, stomach, or upper arm, are underutilized, especially in patients who suffer from very rapid-onset migraines, noted Dr. Loder. “For these people, injectable triptans are a huge improvement because pills don’t work as fast, and if they do work, they have been known to come back up,” she says.

At present, the best remedy for nausea is the antiemetic known as ondansetron, but among its side effects is headache. For nausea, it is much better to stick with promethazine or prochlorperazine (Compazine), because in addition to treating nausea, it specifically addresses headache discomfort, according to Dr. Loder.

Furthermore, the majority of anti-nausea medications are found in the form of suppositories. Of particular assistance, she notes, are what are known as ‘crash’ migraines, whereby a person wakes up in the morning feeling nauseous and with a migraine.

What are the limitations of this migraine study?

There was no information concerning the time and sequence, the formulation of the medications, or even the doses. It also left out two classes of newer migraine drugs — called gepants and ditans — because there were only early data on them when the study was done. These options include

Atogepant (Qulipta) and rimegepant (Nurtec)

lasmiditan (Reyvow).

“But based on my clinical practice, I don’t feel any of these drugs would perform much better than the triptans,” Dr. Loder argues.

Another shortcoming is the study population: a sample that could potentially be targeted to use a smartphone app that helps people with migraines. That means their headaches may be worse than the general population’s, but this is where people need this kind of information, says Dr. Loder.

“Those are the people affected, and they shouldn’t be, because migraines are most common in the young, the healthy, and the active — people who want to work and raise children,” she says. It is reassuring to hear that patients using this app also have high ratings for triptans because, from the perspective of a physician, these drugs are safe with little contraindications from a medical perspective, she further explains.

Are there other useful insights?

Yes. Among the respondents, close to 50 percent of them complained that their pain was not well managed. A third said they used more than one medicine to treat their migraines.

If you have these problems, you should seek the advice of a health care provider who will help you to find a better therapy. “If you’re using non-prescription drugs for your migraine, then you should consider taking a prescription triptan,” advises Dr. Loder. If you often suffer from nausea and vomiting, then you should have some medication against it in your pocket.

She also advises that her patients can download Migraine Buddy, available on the Apple Store free of charge, or the Canadian Migraine Tracker, also a free app.