Study Suggests Headaches More Common With Obesity
New study findings suggest that being overweight or obese may increase the likelihood of having severe headaches and migraines. An increased prevalence of headache may be associated with being underweight as well.
Dr. Earl S. Ford and colleagues at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta analyzed 7,601 adult men and women and found that being overweight or obese increased the likelihood of headache by 1.2- to nearly 1.4-times.
The researchers looked into an association between body mass index (BMI), the ratio between height and weight often used to determine the weight range an individual falls into, and headache among men and women, 20 years of age or older, who participated in the 1999 to 2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The team reported in the medical journal Cephalalgia that overall, about 15 percent of the men and 28 percent of the women reported they had severe headaches or migraines during the previous 3 months.
Almost 35 percent of the study group was overweight (BMI between 25 and 30), another 30 percent were obese (BMI over 30), and 33 percent were in the normal weight range (BMI between 18.5 and 25).
Among the 2 percent of the study population that was under weight, Ford’s group noted a two-fold higher prevalence of headache, but the limited number of underweight participants precluded further analysis.
Once the team ruled out any other factors potentially associated with increased headache risk such as gender, ethnicity, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, diabetes and cholesterol levels, the overweight and obese subjects still had a greater headache frequency than did normal-weight participants.
Ford and colleagues suggest that if obesity increases the risk for headaches, weight management might be a useful approach in headache management.
The researchers also suggested further analyses to establish "whether obesity is causally related to the development of headaches."
—
On the Net: