14 DAY TRIAL // A new analysis of the Women's Health Study, revealed that even though most women with a history of migraine headache with aura have a high risk of stroke, they are more likely to have mild or no disability at all, compared to those without migraine.
A migraine with aura manifests itself through transient neurological symptoms, most of them being visual impairments.
This new study included 27,852 women over a period of 13.5 years, who took part in the Women's Health Study.
The researchers discovered that those who had migraines with aura and experienced an ischemic stroke, were twice as likely to have no significant disability from the event.
At the beginning of the study, all women filled in a questionnaire about their headaches, allowing the researchers to divide them into four categories: 22,723 without any migraine history, 5,129 with a migraine history, 3,612 with active migraine, and out of these – 1,435 with active migraine with aura.
Using the modified Rankin Scale (a seven-point scale that measures degree of impairment), the researchers evaluated functional ability after a stroke at hospital discharge.
Every following year, the women reported new medical conditions, transient ischemic attacks (TIA) or stroke included, reports confirmed by their medical records.
Most women part of the study were Caucasian, of an average age of 55 years, healthy and working in the healthcare field, and over the 13.5 years of follow-up, 398 TIAs and 345 ischemic strokes occurred.
Tobias Kurth, MD, Sc.D., the study's principal author and associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, explained that “the message from this study should be reassuring for migraineurs.
“It is important for women who have migraine with aura to know that their risk of stroke is considerably low and there is high likelihood of a migraine-associated stroke being mild.”
No one knows for certain why do women with migraine with aura, who are most at risk for strokes, are protected from the side effects, but Kurth, who is also director of research at INSERM in Paris, France, speculated that if they have stroke mechanisms that involve smaller vessels (not the traditional mechanisms for stroke) then it is possible that the size of the stroke is smaller too.
This new research is reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.