In the spring, towards Passover, nature awakens from the long winter past. The weather changes and becomes more bready and the days longer, tubers full of pollen waiting to crack and fill the spring air with tiny particles carried by the wind and carrying the genetic load of each plant. While the picturesque description of the spring season sounds like a client from a nature film, for people who suffer from allergies it describes more than anything the season from which they suffer – the season of allergies.
Now, it turns out that the allergy season is also linked to the aggravation of another phenomenon from which many Israelis suffer – migraine.
“Migraine is actually a disease that causes severe offensive headaches and can cause significant suffering,” explains Prof. Shlomit Jost, director of the neuro-oncology unit and a senior physician at Beilinson Hospital’s headache clinic. “Pulsating, accompanied by sensitivity to light, noise, nausea and vomiting. This is an unpleasant experience that actually impairs the patient’s ability to function. Unfortunately, the prevalence of people suffering from migraine is about 15%, with the vast majority suffering from it being women.”
Migraine is affected by a lot of factors as Prof. Jost explains. “There are external factors such as stress, lack of sleep, dehydration and poor nutrition that cause the symptoms and frequency of seizures to worsen,” says Prof. Jost, but an active allergy can also increase the number of migraine attacks and worsen them. In general, the connection between migraine and allergy is very interesting because in most cases allergy patients will suffer from migraine and vice versa. ”
“It seems that the ability of an allergic rhinitis to aggravate the migraine because it is accompanied by inflammation and also migraine itself is associated with an inflammatory process,” explains Prof. Jost. Another statistic that can explain the connection is that our night’s sleep is not good when we suffer from untreated allergies and also poor sleep in itself can cause aggravation, so there is a kind of chain reaction here that turns into a snowball.
The more time we are exposed to the subject of our allergy and its allergens, the more symptoms of allergic rhinitis and congestion as a result of the allergy, and the worse the migraine seems to be. The climate crisis, which in turn causes the transition seasons to lengthen and changes the behavior of pollinating plants at different times of the year, makes everything more challenging.
The stress that characterizes the spring period, and especially in the run-up to Passover, can cause severe worsening of symptoms. And also at a very high frequency ”.
The good news is that today there are very effective treatments for migraine that can be used. “The difference today is that there is no need to accept the impairment of quality of life and daily functioning. Divide into acute and preventive treatments. Acute treatment is treatment during the pain itself in order to alleviate the suffering. Acute treatment is with painkillers familiar to us from pain elsewhere such as paracetamol and a drug from the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug family. For acute treatment there are drugs designed for migraine such as tryptans and drugs that work on the CGRP system.
Preventative treatment is given regularly and is usually used in patients who have significant impairment of quality of life despite optimal acute treatment. For the prevention of migraine use antihypertensive drugs (beta blockers), anticonvulsants, antidepressants. Antibodies to CGRP protein which is a significant tier in migraine headaches.