According to a new study, stress causes headaches and pain makes us feel even more stressed
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It's official: stress causes headaches. And the pain makes us feel even more stressed. I mean, do you feel that you are going to have a severe headache? Try to relax if you don't want to start a vicious circle.
According to new research from the University of Duisburg-Essen, which will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Philadelphia, anxiety and stress worsen the severity of a headache and the more stressed you are, the more your headache spikes.
- To reach these conclusions, the German researchers observed 5.159 subjects aged between 21 and 71 years, through interviews carried out four times a year for two consecutive years. The participants had to record the number of headaches they had each month and at the same time they had to evaluate theirs stress level over the same period on a scale of zero to one hundred.
Well, 31% of the participants had a tension-type headache, 14% a simple migraine, 11% a migraine with the addition of a tension headache and 17% a non-classifiable type headache. Participants who suffered from tension headache gave their stress an average score of 52 out of 100; the patients who had had simple migraine reported a score of 62 out of 100 and, finally, the group with migraine with the addition of a tension headache reported a score of 59 out of 100.
Result: "for each type of headache, an increase in stress was associated with an increase in the number of headaches per month", explains Sara H. Schramm, author of the study. "The results of the work show that stress is a contributing factor to the development and worsening of migraines".
And not only. Along this line, the study also suggests that, while medicine may help mitigate the pain caused by headaches, reducing and managing stress can help prevent it.
"The results of the study - continues Schramm - add weight to the concept that stress can be a contributing factor to the onset of headaches, which accelerates the progression of chronic headache and aggravates headache episodes and which, in turn, headache can be a stressor ”.
Hence, chronic headache sufferers may well consider taking the yoga route before picking up any medicine from drugstore shelves. In short, try to manage your stress, perhaps with one of our tips, and you will silence migraines!
Germana Carillo
READ also:
- Natural remedies for headache (migraine and headache)
- Stress: 10 warning signs
