Sometimes, even the weight of their clothes becomes unbearable. These are some of the hidden agonies sufferers of migraine headaches usually do not talk about, said Dr Rami Burstein, associate professor of neurobiology and anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Patients are afraid to tell me of these symptoms because they are afraid I will think they are crazy,'' said Dr Burstein. But new headache research conducted by Dr Burstein and others has shown an estimated 25 million migraine sufferers that they are not losing their sanity but experiencing a kind of neurological uprising. Research over the past five years strongly suggests that migraines are not primarily caused by changes in blood flow within the brain, as previously suspected, but by a series of misfiring neuron clusters, Dr Burstein and other researchers say.
Migraines are a neurological disease.
That's pretty much a done deal,'' said Dr Stewart Tepper, director of the New England Centre for Headache in Stamford. Migraine headaches are characterised by severe, throbbing pain, often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and sound. Three out of four sufferers are women. Doctors often fail to acknowledge the severity of women's migraines because of a tendency to downplay women's complaints. However, the new view of migraines as a neurological disorder is changing the way people are treated.