MoveAgainstMigraine

Love this question! Thank you for asking it. All of those things you mentioned are important - location, intensity, quality, and other associated symptoms like aura, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and sound. Frequency is also very important - how many days of headache the person is experiencing helps to differentiate treatment options to pursue. Also important are to ask about potential triggers, and think about lifestyle - like sleep habits, diet and exercise, and asking about stress. A thorough headache history is crucial! -AP

Unfortunately we cannot control the weather, though sometimes I wish we could! Sometimes it is best to try to be vigilant about other lifestyle behaviors and reducing other triggers (like lack of sleep, dehydration, stress, missing a meal, etc) to make your brain as resilient as possible to the weather change. It's often the combination of triggers that can lead to a migraine; reducing others can help. -AP

You are right in that some people use these terms interchangeably, but migraine is a clinical diagnosis with a clear neurobiological and electrochemical process that underlies it. A migraine is not "just a headache". Some people use the term headache to mean a tension type headache, which is very different from a migraine. Migraines can be disabling and often include other symptoms besides pain. -AP

Good question! Data does suggest a correlation between autoimmune disease and migraine, but not that one necessarily causes the other. The exact mechanism for the link is not completely understood, but one way to think about it is that if there is inflammation in the body, as in autoimmune disease, there may be an uptick in certain pro-inflammatory chemicals circulating that make the environment more likely to lead to a migraine, and vice versa. Migraine is a complicated biological process that is sensitive to many circulating pro-inflammatory chemicals, so if there is more around, you have a higher likelihood of experiencing a migraine. -AP

It is a complicated relationship, but sleep and migraine often affect each other (both positively and negatively). Some people find sleep to be helpful for stopping a migraine attack. Others wake up in the middle of sleep with an attack and migraine disrupts their sleep. Migraine brains seem to like routine - when routine is disrupted somehow, the brain can be more likely to go into the migraine pathway, so it is important to keep a consistent sleep schedule where possible. -AP