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ALLERGIC REACTIONS: MIGRAINE AND OTHER HEADACHES
One out of five people (most of them women) get migraine headaches. A single attack can last a few hours to a few days, and attacks can strike three times a year – or three times a week. All too often, nausea accompanies a migraine, earning it the nickname ‘sick headache’.
If you’re a person whose life has been bedeviled by migraine, you’ve probably been searching for a solution. And you may have suspected that a food or beverage is somehow responsible for those painful episodes. You could be on the right track.
The notion that a food in the stomach causes a pain in the head isn’t new. Hippocrates, the Greek ‘father of medicine’, noted a connection between food and migraine. And modern research confirms his observation: a survey of 1,883 migraine sufferers in Great Britain found that 95 per cent of the attacks suffered over a three-month period were caused by diet (Headache).
Acting on this and other findings, the link between food allergy and migraine was investigated in a two-year study of thirty-three migraine sufferers by Jonathan Brostoff and co-researchers at the Department of Immunology, Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London. Both RAST tests and follow-up food tests strongly suggested that many of these people had food allergies. They were then treated with elimination diets and food rotation – and responded well.
‘In the twenty-three patients who were sensitive to certain foods, elimination of those foods from the diet resulted in relief (complete in most cases) from migraine,’ report the researchers. The most common migraine triggers in this study were milk, eggs, wheat, chocolate, oranges and tea.
‘We have shown that food allergy is important in some [migraine sufferers],’ conclude the authors. ‘Patients were allergic to more than one food – usually three – and on elimination of these foods from the diet many patients became symptom-free for the first time in several years’ (Lancet).
Ellen Ñ G. Grant, a neurologist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, also investigated the dietary factor in headaches in sixty migraine sufferers. The people studied had reactions to an average of ten foods each, the most common offenders being wheat, oranges, eggs, tea, coffee, chocolate, milk, beef, corn, cane sugar and yeast (much as in Dr Brostoff’s study). When those foods were avoided, all the patients improved, with a dramatic drop in the number of headaches per month. Dr Grant speculates that the few patients who continued to have occasional migraines were sensitive to tobacco smoke, gas or other environmental factors (Lancet).
Yet another researcher, Dr Edda Hanington, of the City of London Migraine Clinic, has noted that certain foods seem to have a distinct knack for triggering migraine. In addition to the foods noted by Drs Brostoff and Grant, Dr Hanington lists alcoholic beverages; fried, fatty food; onions; meat, especially pork; and seafood as prime offenders.
Many of those foods contain tyramines and other histamine-like substances. Some migraine researchers theorize that these substances cause the blood vessels in your head to swell, triggering a migraine. (Tyramines are also found in aged, fermented or pickled foods, such as strong cheese, red wine and pickled herring.)
Dr Hanington has also found that tartrazine (El02), a common additive in foods, beverages and medicines, can provoke migraine. So can sodium nitrite and monosodium glutamate, found in cured meats and some processed foods respectively.
Despite the work of Drs Brostoff, Grant, Hanington and others, the role of allergy in migraine remains controversial -there’s some disagreement as to whether these reactions can be considered allergic in the strict sense. Regardless of the mechanism involved, however, food-induced migraine should be handled like any other food-induced reaction: by careful observation and avoidance.
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