Do people who have continuous migraine also have triggers and protectors?
Individuals with chronic migraine have 15 or more headaches per month, often resulting in days of continuous migraine. We are interested in understanding the impact of the most suspected migraine trigger, stress, on chronic migraine.
In a Curelator™ study1 with 136 participants analyzing more than 8,200 migraine days over three months using the N1-Headache™ App, it was concluded that on average higher perceived stress increased the odds of higher severity of pain. Although stress has been traditionally seen as a trigger (with high levels preceding attack onset), the day-to-day relationship between perceived stress and peak pain severity proved to be more complex, with most participants showing amplified pain severity on days with higher stress. Curelator™ has proposed referring to such factors as Severity Amplifiers™.
However, there was great variation within and between individuals. Some individuals showed no relationship between stress and peak pain severity. In other individuals lower peak severity was associated with days with higher perceived stress. Factors that are associated with lower peak severity (such as stress in those individuals) are referred to as Severity Attenuators™.
Everybody is different! This underscores the need for each individual to understand their own unique experience and to personally tailor treatments. Please follow the following link to read more about this novel study.