14 DAY TRIAL // Though most people would have never believed such an association to be possible, a recent study, analyzing data from thousands of post menopausal women, showed that subjects exhibiting high headache frequencies were 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who did not suffer from migraines. The find was published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention journal, by a team of researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, led by Christopher I. Li, M.D., Ph.D.
"We found that, overall, women who had a history of migraines had a 30 percent lower risk of breast cancer compared to women who did not have a history of such headaches," explained Li, who is also a breast-cancer epidemiologist and an associate member of the Hutchinson Center's Public Health Sciences Division.
He went on to explain "Migraines seem to have a hormonal component in that they occur more frequently in women than in men, and some of their known triggers are associated with hormones. For example, women who take oral contraceptives – three weeks of active pills and one week of inactive pills to trigger menstruation – tend to suffer more migraines during their hormone-free week. By the third trimester of pregnancy, 80 percent of migraine sufferers do not have these episodes."
Though the mechanisms through which migraines influence the development of breast cancer are still unknown, researchers ventured to assume that the connections are hormone-related. A future goal of researchers in this field will be to identify exactly which hormone plays what part in this ensemble of inter-connections.
"While these results need to be interpreted with caution, they point to a possible new factor that may be related to breast-cancer risk. This gives us a new avenue to explore the biology behind risk reduction. Hopefully this could help stimulate other ideas and extend what we know about the biology of the disease," Li concluded.