Migraines Linked to Heart Risk in Men

Finding echoes prior study in women.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 15 (HealthDay News) -- Men who suffer from migraine headaches appear to be at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, mostly due to a higher risk of having a heart attack, researchers report.

But the advice to men with or without migraines is the same, experts say: Pay attention to heart risk factors such as elevated blood pressure and cholesterol.

"Migraine has been associated with major risk factors for cardiovascular disease such as hypertension and elevated cholesterol, so patients with migraine should focus on traditional risk factors until we understand why migraine is linked with cardiovascular disease," said study author Dr. Tobias Kurth, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.

Kurth presented his findings Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA), in Chicago.

"Migraine is not so much a risk factor, but a sort of risk marker," added Dr. Gerald Fletcher, AHA spokesman and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Fla. "This should alert physicians and the public that this could be a problem."

This is only the second study to find a correlation between migraine and heart disease. Previous research by the same team of investigators found an association in women who experienced migraines with "aura," or visual disturbances preceding the attack.

This time, the researchers followed more than 20,000 men participating in the Physicians' Health Study, all of whom were free of heart disease at the beginning of the study.

Over the next 15.7 years, 7.2 percent of participants reported having migraines.

Compared with men who did not report migraines, migraine sufferers had a 42 percent increased risk of heart attack, the study found. This was similar to the relative risk found in the study of women.

Overall, men with migraines were at 24 percent increased risk of major cardiovascular events, with heart attacks being the leading reported problem.