What causes migraines?

Answer 1

# Diet/Allergy: Many foods can trigger migraines. We hear about this all the time. Wines, aged cheeses, and chocolate being the most popular culprits. What is not often talked about is the role poor nutrition can play in causing migraines. Magnesium deficiency and a lack of the B vitamins are the most prominent. Maintaining a consistent eating pattern is also important, because dips in blood sugar or dips in your serotonin levels caused by lack of food can trigger a migraine.

# Environmental allergies: such as to mold.

# Smoking. Besides acting as an allergen and tripping you up that way, migraines may be caused in part by excess dopamine. Nicotine increases dopamine.

# Odors: Some migraineurs exhibit a sensitivity to perfumes or certain odors.

# Sunlight. Fluorescent light. Glare from computer screens. Sometimes it is the light itself, sometimes it is flickering - such as the almost imperceptible flicker of fluorescent lights, or a ceiling fan than is spinning over a light source.

# Stress, both directly and indirectly. Directly, because the physical changes brought on by stress (or by relaxations after long periods of stress) can cause migraines. Indirectly, because stress as a whole lowers your threshold for any other migraine trigger you might have. For example, perhaps you can normally stand 5 hours under fluorescent lights. Being stressed might lower that threshold down to 3 hours.

# Weather (barometric changes, cold, humidity, etc.. Different weather patterns affect people differently.)

# Extreme temperature shifts: such as staying in air conditioning all day and then walking outside into humid, summer weather. Or taking an incredibly hot shower and then running to catch the bus on a freezing day. You want to give your body time to adjust.

# Dehydration

# Patent Foramen Ovale - PFO is a congenital birth defect in which there is a small hole in the heart. Having surgery to correct this anomaly can help cut down on the frequency of your migraines.

# Lack of sleep OR too much sleep. (Maintaining a normal sleep schedule is key. This means not sleeping in until all hours on the weekends. You get up at the same time every day, you go to bed at the same time.)

# Hormonal changes (puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause)

# Migraines from exertion. These can be brought on from exercise, or sometimes brought on by sex.

# Injury: Some people have migraines develop only after injuries, like a concussion, or neck trauma.

# Pseudotumor cerebri - where too much cerebrospinal fluid in the body is pressing on the brain. Sufferers are asked to maintain a healthy weight, and are often put on diuretics to help them urinate excess fluid from the body.

# Chiari Malformation - a condition where the lower back part of the skull is too small, and presses in on the brain. Surgery is the preferred treatment.
what causes migrains

Answer 2

Migraine is a neurological disease. Those who suffer Migraine often react to Migraine Triggers - specific things which cause physiological changes in the body resulting in the neurological cascade that is a Migraine attack. Triggers include environment, physical, food and lifestyle. There are hundreds of possible triggers. There are 4 stages to a Migraine attack and a sufferer may experience only one, or more of these stages. Pain is the third stage, and a Migraine without pain is often known as a 'silent migraine'. Migraine can involve blood vessels resulting in pain, but not always. It is always neurologically based however.


Though there are theories about the causes of migraines, the exact mechanisms are still unknown. Most people suffering from migraine have a hereditary disposition; if one or both parents have migraine, the likelihood of a child having the condition is very high. Also, there seems to be a link between migraine and obesity. Most studies have attempted to explain migraines in terms of one particular causative factor and have failed to provide an explanation for the complexity of the symptoms and clinical observations. It's likely that a combination of factors result in a particular set of symptoms. These input factors include chronic inflammation in trigger points in muscles, emotional stimuli triggering the limbic system (part of the brain) to increase muscle contractions, and neurotransmitters like serotonin and others that affect the contraction/dilation of blood vessels and other tissues in the brain (vascular system input), causing them to become inflamed and swollen, resulting in a headache.

A theory is that the sum of the vascular system input plus the input from trigger points and emotional stimuli determines whether or not pain is a symptom, and if so, how intense the pain is. This could explain how some people can have trigger points or experience emotional duress without having headaches or migraines, while others get severe headaches. In the UK, migraines affect one in four women and one in 12 men, which suggests that hormones play a role. Fluctuations in estrogen (menstruation, pregnancy, menopause and use of oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapy) lead to migraine in many women.
I experience migraines and do not agree that obesity and migraines are linked because everyone I know with migraines is actually quite slim. But I do agree with the comment you made about having severe headaches because I experience those and did not know what caused them. I did understand that the condition was in my family and that was why I had the condition.

Answer 3

Migraines are caused by the enlargement of blood vessels in the brain.