Headaches & Rainy Days: A Surprising Link Amongst Teenagers

Having been a headache sufferer since I was a kid, I can relate to having to take everything from Tylenol to Advil and Aleve, as well as Vicodin with a side of Phenegran to go with it for the super-migraines. 

I used to think that I had noticed a trend that being by a large body of water would trigger them.  But as I progressed in my career, I realized that it was probably moreso the traveling itself, than the water.   However, we can't discount the role of barometric pressure changes.

Here's new research that points to the weather as being potentially causative in the role of headaches amongst teens.

It turns out that those who want to blame the weather may be right

In a study of 25 children and teenagers with migraines or chronic tension-type headaches, researchers found that symptoms tended to flare up on days when it rained or when humidity was higher than normal.

Before you go blaming the weather on your headaches now, understand that a study with 25 participants is really a low-validity study.  There are 310 million people in the U.S.  Twenty-five means nothing.

However...

In the jounal Headache, the report shows the study participants were nearly three times more likely to have a headache when it was raining or when the humidity was higher than average, compared with drier conditions.

People who suffer migraines or other types of debilitating headaches believe that weather changes are often one of the triggers. But there are conflicting conclusions in the scientific literature.

In this particular study, researchers gave children handheld computers to record their headache symptoms in "real time" over two weeks, then compared that information with weather data that had been obtained from a weather-tracking software program.

This study design is unique in that fashion as there haven't been any studies that compare variables in "real time" like this before.  Thus, this can improve the validity of the results.

So, what they found was that kids in this study had nearly 60% odds of reporting headache symptoms versus about 20% during periods without rain.

This doesn't explain why some kids would get headaches on rainy days, nor does it account for other features of the weather or the kids' days that weren't tested or accounted for.

A recent study of 7,000 people with various headche patters found that risk of symptoms was higher or days when the temperature was up or the barometric pressure dropped (typically on cloudy skies and stormy days).  It has long been suspected that afflicted joints are sensitive to barometric pressure changes.  One doesn't necessarily have to have a "bum knee" or prior injuries to be able to predict the weather.

As usual, the study's author can not draw conclusions from the results, nor can they say what meaningful clinical wisdom can be gleaned from it. 

For now, it should suffice that some can simply "Blame It On The Rain".