Migraines during pregnancy may be linked to stroke
New findings might signal women at risk for various vascular ailments
By Nathan Seppa
Pregnant women who have one or more migraines also face a heightened risk of stroke and other vascular diseases, even during the pregnancy, a new study finds. Although strokes during a pregnancy are rare, women with a migraine listed on their medical chart face a 30-fold increase in the risk for the most common kind of stroke, researchers report online March 10 in the British Medical Journal.
Pregnancy is actually a time when women who routinely contend with migraines are often free of them. “A lot of women have a wonderful kind of honeymoon away from migraines during pregnancy,” says study coauthor Cheryl Bushnell, a neurologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Indeed, in a national database of more than 18 million women who were pregnant at some point from 2000 to 2003, Bushnell and her colleagues found only 33,965 women who had migraines listed on their medical charts upon discharge from the hospital — a rate well below the average.
But when the researchers checked for other ailments on the charts, they found that women with migraines were 15 times as likely to have had a stroke listed on the chart, compared with women without migraines. The stroke could have occurred before or during pregnancy. What’s more, when counting only ischemic strokes, which account for the vast majority for all people, the risk rose to 30-fold. Ischemic strokes result when a blood clot blocks a vessel in the brain.