According to the scientists, men who experience regular migraine headaches turn up to be at greater risk for developing cardiovascular disease, mostly because of a higher risk of having a heart attack.
But specialists say that the advice to men, suffering from migraines or not, is the same: keep your mind on heart risk factors such as increased blood pressure and cholesterol.
"Migraine has been connected with crucial risk factors for cardiovascular disease including hypertension and increased cholesterol, and therefore patients suffering from migraine should concentrate on traditional risk factors until we fully understand why migraine is associated with cardiovascular disease," said research author Dr Tobias Kurth, an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston.
The findings of Kurth were demonstrated at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA), in Chicago.
A kind of risk marker
"Migraine is not so much a risk factor, but a type of risk marker," explained Dr Gerald Fletcher, AHA spokesman and a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida. "This should warn the healthcare professionals and the patients that this could constitute a problem."
This is only the second research to discover a correlation between migraine and heart disease. Previous study, performed by the same team of scientists discovered an association in women who experienced migraines with "aura", or visual disturbances preceding the attack.
This time, the scientists followed over twenty thousand men taking part in the Physicians’ Health Study, all of whom were free of heart disease at the outset of the research.
Over the next 15.7 years, 7.2 per cent of participants reported having migraines.
42 per cent greater risk
The researchers discovered that in comparison to men who did not experience migraines, migraine sufferers had a 42 per cent elevated risk of heart attack. This was similar to the relative risk discovered in the research of women.
Generally, men suffering from migraines were at 24 per cent higher risk of major cardiovascular events, with heart attacks being the crucial observed problem.
"This translated into an additional risk of two major events per 10 000 men annually," Kurth said. "The absolute increase of risk is rather on the low side."
Men suffering from migraines had a 12 per cent higher risk for ischemic stroke and a seven per cent higher risk for cardiovascular death. Nevertheless, the authors of the research said that neither figure was statistically important, meaning it could have happened by chance.
Findings apply to older men
Furthermore, the average age of the participants was 56, therefore the findings cannot be extrapolated to younger men. Generally, migraines happen more commonly among younger people.
The scientists had not had information concerning migraine aura in these men, hence it is not clear whether the findings are limited to that kind of migraine or not.
Other questions remain.
"We still don’t know what the possible mechanisms are," Kurth said. "Migraine is connected with other risk factors including hypertension and cholesterol, and there is a correlation between migraine and inflammatory markers. Whether these factors really cause the connection is unknown at this point."
"Until we know more, the things that should be considered are key [heart] risk factors," he added. "If you have this marker for elevated risk and you have other risk factors, those should be modified and treated."
