Migraine induced by medicine

Do you take too many over-the-counter painkillers?

If so, you should think about whether you have migraine because of your use of painkillers. A study of arthritis patients (1) has shown that about 8% of those who take large amounts of over-the-counter analgesics develop continuous (nearly every day) migraine. Everyone who developed chronic migraine or headache had migraine attacks before they started to use large amounts of over-the-counter medicines for the treatment of arthritis.

So there is a good reason to have a look at how many pills (of all sorts) you pop in your mouth every day even though you don't suffer from arthritis. Write in your diary every time you take a painkilling pill and, if you take pills every day or nearly every day and still have a lot of headache or migraine, it could be the over-the-counter medicines that are the cause of your attacks.

Talk to your doctor about alternative treatments, or whether it's time for you to take a cold turkey!

Who develops continuous migraine?

There are a number of risk factors and factors which, to some extent, indicate a smaller risk of developing continuous migraine - migraine nearly all the time. We may, to a great extent, be able to control some of them ourselves, others are beyond the control of individuals (2).

Risk factors

The authors of the article give no weighting of the importance of the different factors.

Factors that increase the risk of continuous migraine	Factors that reduce the risk of development of continous migraine)
Overuse of over-the counter analgesics	No other form of headache
Mixed use of medicines of different types	Does not develop migraine from glare
Over-the-counter medicine used for all attacks	Parents have/had migraine with aura
Damage/injury to the head	Moderate consumption of beer and wine
Vomiting	PMS
Contraceptive pills	Pain shifts from side to side
Many attacks	Use of prophylactic medicine over a long period
Poor experience with prophylactic medicine	Aura only as a disturbance of vision
Migraine began early in life	The number of years of education

Medicine induced migraine is not always typical.

114 people who had an overuse of migraine medicine (triptan, ergotamine and over-the-counter medicines) were studied to see which symptoms they developed during an attack. It was found that patients who took many doses of ergotamine and/or over-the-counter medicines didn’t generally fall into doctors’ normal definition of migraine (3).

(3) G. Relja, A. Granato, R. M. Antonello og M. Zorzon, 2004. Headache induced by chronic substance use: analysis of medication overused and minimum required to induce headache. Headache 44, 148-153.

« BACK