By Karla Gale
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For some individuals prone to
migraine, this susceptibility may not necessarily interfere
with their sex life and may in fact improve their libido,
according to research published in the journal Headache.
“The goal of this research was to understand migraine
better,” lead author Dr. Timothy T. Houle told Reuters Health.
“By better understanding how the brain is altered with this
syndrome, we can develop better drugs in the future.”
“Migraines have other commonly associated symptoms, such as
sleep abnormalities and a higher risk of depression. Altered
sex drive may be another quirk of being a migraine,” he added.
Although it is commonly believed that sex drive is reduced
by headaches, and sexual intercourse can cause specific types
of headaches, Houle and his associates note, other research has
suggested that sexual intercourse may alleviate the pain of
migraine in some patients.
Houle, from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his associates tested the
theory that migraine and sexual desire may both be associated
with serotonin. Evidence for this is the reduced libido that
often accompanies depression treatment with a selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which increases brain levels of
serotonin, whereas migraine is associated with reduced
serotonin levels.
To investigate this complex relationship, Houle, and his
associates recruited 59 adults who had at least 10 headaches
annually. Twenty-three subjects (7 men and 16 women) were
classified as having migraine, and 36 (18 men and 18 women) as
having tension-type headache.
The subjects completed the self-administered Sexual Desire
Inventory (SDI), which includes nine items measuring dyadic
desire and five measuring solitary sexual desire. “It allowed
the subjects to rate how much they think about sex and how much
they desire sex,” Houle told Reuters Health.
“Men reported about 24-percent higher sex drive than did
women,” the researcher said, “and the difference between
migraine and tension-type headache was almost equivalent — 20
percent.” Thus, women with migraines reported about the same
relative levels of sex drive as men with tension type
headaches.
On the nine-point scale the subjects specifically rated
their own sexual desire compared with that of others of the
same age and sex. The migraine patients reported the highest
level (5.0), which is “above the expected median (4.0) on this
item,” Houle and his colleagues note. Those with tension-type
headaches gave themselves an average rating of 3.7 for this
item.
What was even more interesting, Houle said, was that the
migraine patients were aware that they rated their sexual
desire higher than that of other patients in the group.
However, he added that “there was no evidence that their
sexual desire was beyond that of high normal or that they are
hypersexual.”
“It can now be hypothesized that a serotonergic link may be
implicated in both migraine headaches and sexual desire,” the
researchers conclude. Also, serotonin receptors also appear to
be involved in several aspects of sexual functioning.
On the other hand, they point out that there are multiple
classes and subtypes of serotonin receptors. Therefore, they
conclude that “any neurochemical mechanism(s) that might link
serotonin and migraine would likely be sophisticated and
multifactorial.”
Houle concluded: “Our research is now focused on
mathematical modeling to predict migraine activity, to see if
we can figure out for any individual patient when they are at
increased risk of an attack so it can be aborted.”
SOURCE: Headache, June 2006.
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