| 4:47:18 PM - Mon, Aug 1st 2022 |
|
How migraine treatments have become more effective over the years
If you don’t suffer from migraine headaches, you probably know at least one person who does. Nearly 40 million Americans get them – 28 million of them women and girls – making migraine the second most disabling condition in the world after low back pain. Several studies have found that migraine became more frequent during the pandemic, too.
Support เอ็กโอ วอลเลท system, make any fiscal transaction at any time, and then do it yourself without prompting the slip. Don't contact the working group. When you win a thousand walks.
I get migraine headaches, but thankfully they’re more bizarre than excruciating. Every few weeks, ocular migraine clouds my vision with strange zigzagging lights for a half-hour; and once or twice a year I get attacks that cause temporary memory loss. (One came on while I was grocery shopping, and I couldn’t remember what month or year it was, what I was there to buy or how old my kids were.)
Despite its ubiquity, research on migraine has long been underfunded. The National Institutes of Health spent only US$40 million (S$55 million) on migraine research in 2021; by comparison, it spent US$218 million researching epilepsy, which afflicts one-twelfth as many Americans.
Why is this devastating condition so woefully understudied?
“It’s a woman’s disease,” explained Dr. Robert Cowan, a neurologist and a former director of the Stanford Headache Program. In other words, he said, sexism almost certainly plays a role in medicine’s apathy toward the condition.
The good news is that over the past several years, the medical establishment has become more interested in the issue, and a handful of new treatments for migraine have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Some of them are quite promising. Here’s what migraine sufferers should know about today’s treatment landscape.
Recognize the symptoms of migraine and get a diagnosis.
Far too many people with migraine suffer in silence. “Fewer than 30 per cent of people suffering with migraine seek medical advice, and only some of those patients will receive an appropriate migraine treatment,” said Dr. Santiago Mazuera, a neurologist at the Sandra and Malcolm Berman Brain & Spine Institute in Baltimore.
Migraine is a neurological disorder and it differs from garden-variety headaches. People are likely to suffer from migraine if they have had at least five headache attacks in their lives, each lasting between four and 72 hours, and if the pain fulfills two out of these four criteria: It throbs or pulsates; it is on one side of the head; it is moderate to severe; it worsens with activity. Also, these attacks must cause either nausea or sensitivity to light and sound.
|
