THE ESSENTIAL
- 20% of women of childbearing age suffer from migraines.
- To prevent migraines, pregnant women should avoid overwork, intense physical effort, sleep well and overeating.
Women who suffer from migraines are 40% more likely to have pre-eclampsia, according to work by researchers who were presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). As a reminder, pre-eclampsia is a complication occurring during the last trimester of pregnancy, with no known predisposing factor. Manifestations are high blood pressure and strong albuminuria, kidney problem. The finding of these signs in a pregnant woman requires hospitalization and the initiation of antihypertensive treatment. But the most effective treatment remains childbirth, the triggering of which is imperative in the absence of a rapid response to the antihypertensive, whatever the date of the term.
28% increased risk of high blood pressure
This risk of pre-eclampsia is not the only one faced by pregnant women who suffer from migraines. The researchers have precisely identified them. Thus, they estimated that they had 17% more risk of premature delivery and 28% of high blood pressure, that is to say an abnormally high blood pressure in the blood vessels. For pregnant women, there are three ways to develop high blood pressure: either it was already known before and continues at this time, or pregnancy triggers a hypertensive disease that can remain following childbirth, or hypertension blood pressure is an epiphenomenon: blood pressure increases during pregnancy and then normalizes following childbirth. In any case, it is imperative to be monitored for this problem because high blood pressure presents risks for both the mother and the baby.
No link to gestational diabetes
To arrive at a list of the risks of future mothers who have migraines, the researchers analyzed the health data of more than 19,000 women and 30,000 pregnancies for more than 20 years. Thus, they noted that 11% of them already had migraines before becoming pregnant, which means that migraine is not only related to pregnancy and that there might be a predisposition of certain patients to suffer from it. But not everything is negative. According to the researchers, suffering from migraines during pregnancy would not affect gestational diabetes or low birth weight babies. Finally, all of these headache-related risks remain relatively low, the researchers concluded.
