In this light, direct or indirect (by 5-HT release) stimulation of 5-HT2 receptors was supposed to be the mechanism of headache induced by some serotonergic agonists ([60], for review). Alcohol can certainly act as a trigger im bored and drinking gives me something to do for some individuals, and understanding your triggers and alcohol intake can help manage migraine episodes. And if you’re looking for migraine relief without prescriptions or severe side effects, consider trying CEFALY.
Wine and Headache. Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, June 2014.
- Table 3 shows the distribution of daily alcoholic beverage consumption.
- People who have had a heart attack are at increased risk for another one, so implementing healthy lifestyle changes, including reducing your alcohol intake, is important.
- Plots of iterations versus sampled values for each variable were inspected to check model convergence.
- High humidity and heat can easily lead to dehydration, another common trigger.
- Since alcohol has a dehydrating effect, drinking 16 ounces of water between each alcoholic beverage can help offset alcohol-related dehydration.
Once it gets into your system, it is converted into a chemical that triggers migraine. The risks “increase exponentially” with heavy drinking, researchers found. If you’re tannin-sensitive, the above foods will also likely trigger you. No potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article were reported.
Red Wine and Heart Health
This study investigates the importance of alcohol as a migraine trigger factor, the prevalence of alcohol consumers and the mechanism of headache provocation. A MEDLINE search from 1988 to October 2007 was performed for “headache and alcohol”, “headache and wine”, “migraine and alcohol” and “migraine and wine”. In retrospective studies, about one-third of the migraine patients reported alcohol as a migraine trigger, at least occasionally, but only 10% of the migraine patients reported alcohol as a migraine trigger frequently. Regional differences were reported, perhaps depending in part on alcohol habits. No differences were found between migraine and tension headache and different genders.
Alcohol and Migraines: Can Drinking Trigger A Headache?
No differences between migraine and tension headache were reported [24, 26] (Table 1). The exact mechanism behind this observation may indicate that migraine leads to alcohol-avoidance, does alcohol used in cooking effect sobriety rather than alcohol having any protective role against migraine. However, further studies related to primary headaches and alcohol consumption with low risk of bias are required.
Whether or not alcohol is a migraine headache trigger is debatable. While some people do experience migraine headaches after drinking alcohol, not everyone does. If you’ve identified alcohol as a trigger for your migraine headaches, avoiding it altogether is probably best.
The exact mechanism behind this observation may indicate that migraine leads to alcohol-avoidance rather than alcohol having a protective role against migraine. However, there is a need to conduct further studies related to primary headaches and alcohol consumption with low risk of bias. Additionally, patients and physicians should consider the latest medical knowledge to avoid perpetuating the myths about alcohol consumption and primary headaches. Additionally, it would be useful to check whether migraine patients enjoy the advantages or disadvantages of less drinking. Whereas the World Health Organization (WHO) states that there is no safe alcohol dose [19], Panconesi et al. conclude that low consumption is not a contraindication for headache patients [79]. However, each patient makes individual decisions based on their own experience.
However, migraine patients consume less alcohol for various reasons. Therefore, patients with primary headache need to determine for themselves the association between alcohol and headache without any myths and influences. The results of our meta-analysis are that there is a lack of a relationship between the risk of TTH and alcohol consumption. The role of dietary triggers has been well reviewed previously [1, 2]. Some studies show that patients in whom alcohol or wine/beer acts as a trigger factor also had significantly more other foods as a trigger [19,73]. Certainly, some headache patients cannot tolerate some alcoholic drinks, although not frequently, and perhaps only in combination in the presence of other trigger factors (stress, for example).
Drinking problems occur in every age, but in the 25–49 age group, alcohol has the highest impact on mortality caused by cancer deaths and also life disability [24, 25]. Distribution of daily alcoholic beverages consumption (total daily quantity and by type of alcoholic drink), for all person‐days, within‐person means, and within‐person SDs. Variable alcohol intake had 10.6% missing values on day‐1 and 11.6% on day‐2; migraine on day‐2 was missing in 7.4%. Same‐day alcohol intake (Yes/No), and quantity of each type of alcoholic drink had 4.7% missing values. In fact, many headache sufferers abstain from alcohol or consume less than the general population. Often, alcohol-induced headaches also have characteristics that resemble your usual headaches, whether they are migraines, cluster headaches, or tension headaches.
Additionally, only a few of the studies divided participants into migraine with and without aura. Therefore, there was insufficient data to analyze the relationship between alcohol and aura, and the data that does exist is inconsistent [65, 86]. As mentioned in the discussion above, alcohol consumption assessment is strongly based on patients’ honesty. If there is misleading data in questionnaires or during medical interviews, their overall subsequent analysis is also distorted.
Low doses of alcohol during meals significantly lower the frequency of induced-attacks and the alcoholic consumption during stress was related to higher migraine attack frequency [37]. While some report beer as a trigger [19, 24], others found no association [30, 31, 34, 37]. Figure 1A shows https://sober-house.org/alcohol-use-disorder-symptoms-and-causes-3/ the individual probabilities of migraine attack, when no alcohol was consumed on either day‐1 or day‐2. Red dots represent the median individual probability, and vertical lines represent the individual 95% CI. These probabilities (red dots) serve as reference for the other three panels.