A migraines and asthma study released Monday by the University of Cincinnati found that pre-existing asthma could be an early indicator for chronic migraine attacks in the future, according to a university statement.
The findings of the new study were released online last month in the journal Headache, a publication of the
American Headache Society, the University of Cincinnati said in a statement. Researchers from the university, the Montefiore Headache Center, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Vedanta Research all contributed to the study.
Researchers studied about 4,500 people who experienced episodic migraines or fewer than 15 headaches per month in 2008. They analyzed data from the American Migraine Prevalence and Prevention Study during their work.
The study's participants completed written questionnaires both in 2008 and 2009 and then split into two groups — one with episodic migraines and coexisting asthma, and another with episodic migraines and no asthma.
Researchers discovered that after one year of following up, the onset of chronic migraines developed in 5.4 percent of participants also suffering from asthma and in 2.5 percent of individuals without asthma.
"In this study, persons with episodic migraine and asthma at baseline were more than twice as likely to develop chronic migraine after one year of follow-up as compared to those with episodic migraine but not asthma," Dr. Vincent Martin, professor of medicine at the University of Cincinnati's Division of General Internal Medicine and the study's lead author, said in the statement.
"The strength of the relationship is robust; asthma was a stronger predictor of chronic migraine than depression, which other studies have found to be one of the most potent conditions associated with the future development of chronic migraine," he continued.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, migraine headaches can last from four to 72 hours if left untreated and are three times more common in women than they are in men, affecting about 10 percent of the world's population.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that asthma is a disease that attacks the lungs, causing repeated episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness, and nighttime or early morning coughing. Asthma affected 7 percent of adults and 8.3 percent of children in the United States in 2013.
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