Today, statistics reveal that roughly 10 million people in the United Kingdom between the age bracket of 15-69 years suffer from migraines. Although migraine in itself isn’t life-threatening, you should know that it can lead to other severe health conditions, such as stroke, if care isn’t taken quickly. One effective way to treat migraine is by taking the right migraine medication, such as Sumatriptan tablets.
Migraines and common headaches have a lot of things in common. Before you go ahead to buy the best tablets for migraine, you need to be very sure of your condition. That said, here’s a burning question, what exactly are the differences between migraines and common headaches? How do you understand whether or not you have a chronic migraine? Read on to find out all you should know about these migraine-related questions below.
Headaches & Migraines: Here’s what you need to know below:
Today, nearly everyone across the world experiences headaches occasionally. However, when your headaches occur frequently, it could mean that you’re suffering from a headache disorder, such as tension-type disorder.
Sometimes, many people dismiss their migraines as just common headaches. Migraines are different from common headaches in many ways and you can always identify your condition through the symptoms that you experience. In case you don’t know, migraines are a neurological condition that often results in throbbing pain in one particular area.
If you think you have a common headache that goes on for roughly 15 days in a month. In addition, you also feel certain migraine symptoms for about eight of those days. In most cases, you may be suffering from chronic migraine and not a common headache.
Chronic migraines and common headaches are two different things. You can spot the differences between them through the symptoms that you experience. Some common symptoms of chronic migraines include throbbing pain, head pain (moderate to severe), vomiting or nausea, dizziness, sensitivity to light, and many more. These symptoms are also the same for migraines but very different for common headaches.
Diagnosis for chronic migraine
A patient can only go for a chronic migraine diagnosis if they suffer headaches for at least 15 days monthly. When chronic migraine is detected, your condition may have different triggers compared to another patient suffering from the same illness.
Below are a few common triggers you may experience with chronic migraine:
- Stress
- Coffee
- Sleep difficulty
Furthermore, chronic migraines have a lot to do with hormonal changes. Women can experience these changes at different periods in their life, especially during the monthly menstrual cycle, menopause, and pregnancy. This explains why chronic migraines mostly affect women in the UK and other parts of the world.
Chronic migraine treatment
Chronic migraine is a serious neurological condition that may affect a patient’s quality of life. It restricts its patients from engaging in certain activities that may trigger the condition. It prevents them from going to work, attending meetings, or even going to school (students). The annoying part is that most migraine symptoms may even surface without any form of headache.
If you currently experience chronic migraine, you need to understand that this illness isn’t curable. Instead, you can always opt for certain treatment options, such as the use of migraine tablets, to control your symptoms. With the best tablets for migraines, you can easily reduce the intensity of your migraine and carry on with your daily activities. But even the best tablets can’t prevent you totally from experiencing at least a migraine attack in the future.
Apart from taken migraine tablet Sumatriptan, there are many other treatment options that a patient can rely on:
- Botox injections
- Anti-seizure drugs
- Advanced procedures
Your doctor will only prescribe you migraine pain relief tablets for a short period. Long-period usage of these painkillers may result in what is known as drug-induced headaches
But what exactly will happen if your condition doesn’t improve with short-term migraine pain relief tablets? In this case, you should:
- Consider visiting your doctor that specialises in migraine for detox.
- If a patient fails to respond to migraine medications and detoxification, the best option is to go for the team approach. In this case, a team of experts (doctor, nurse, psychiatrist, and therapist) will meet with the patient and the family to find the best treatment option.
Lifestyle modification is another effective chronic migraine treatment. It involves focusing on how to mitigate migraine attacks by managing certain lifestyles, including the following:
- Weight loss
- Exercise
- Stress-free and relaxation
- Eating with the right food pattern
- Hydration
