Pregnancy

Migraines and Pregnancy

Recent research revealed that more than 80% of women experience from mild headaches to severe migraines during their childbearing years. Among them, pregnant women may experience incapacitating headaches accompanied by nausea, vomiting, phonophobia and photophobia, the typical symptoms of migraines, experienced by only 20% of all women in the research.

Although it is not possible to determine the incidence of migraine during pregnancy, it is known that migraine headaches may be influenced by all those hormonal changes of pregnancy, resulting in improvement or worsening of headache symptoms. Pregnant women tend to suffer from migraine for the first time during pregnancy, although symptoms may vary from woman to woman.

Migraine headaches are totally different from stress or tension headaches. These are a type of vascular headache resulting from blood vessels dilating in the brain, however your chances to experience it cannot be predicted but easy to detect when the first stronger headaches appear in your early pregnancy and they cannot be diminished with rest.

There is evidence of a slight correlation between migraines and hormones. Due to hormone changes that occur during pregnancy, the probabilities to suffer from migraine headaches increase during this stage of your life, and it is hard to get treatment because of the side effects that medications can cause to the developing baby.

Some studies suggest that medications usually prescribed for common headaches do not appear to increase any significantly harm to the baby or risk of birth defects, but once again, you should be aware of the uncertainty of side effects and neonatal effects of medications. For pregnant women there is no risk, just discomfort from experiencing migraines.

However, if you are suffering from headache accompanied by fever and blurred vision, or if the headache persists for more than a few hours or is returning frequently, those can be signs of some other disease. Report this to your doctor if you are experiencing headaches with these characteristics.

To prevent pregnancy related problems, many physicians prefer to treat migraine headaches with symptomatic relief, consisting of nonpharmacologic treatments, using a medication specifically designed to alleviate migraines. These treatments include biofeedback, ice, rest, massage, and the avoidance of all those recognizable trigger factors; otherwise, your doctor may suggest an analgesic medication.

However, most preparations to relieve symptoms of migraine headaches consist of a combination of an analgesic, a barbiturate, and caffeine. Some of them may include a narcotic such as codeine, and including aspirin, whose use during pregnancy is still controversial, because of a small increase in birth defects seen in babies exposed to aspirin during the first trimester, although most studies have not supported association with adverse effects.