I suffered from migraines for over a decade. They were infrequent at first but, at the peak, I was getting 1-2 a week and felt like I was just "surviving" in life. I saw countless doctors and specialty clinics, none of which offered long term relief other than drugs.
For me, Rizatriptan helped take the edge off pain but I always had more migraines than pills could safely relieve in any given month. In the end, most months I had to choose whether I would get relief in the moment or save the 1-2 remaining pills for the following week(s) before a refill.
I had every blood / allergy test available and none ever showed any issues. I thought there may be a correlation to gluten but there were times where gluten (bread) helped with the nausea side effects.
Ultimately, I gave up gluten, coffee and sugar all at once. Within weeks I felt better and suffered no migraines for over a year until I decided to test the waters with a flour tortilla. Within a few hours I was bed ridden with a migraine for 2-3 days.
I have worked sugar back in to my diet in moderation but gluten and coffee are still out. I have only had that one migraine in 3+ years.
Anyone suffering, the absolute best advice I ever got was to keep a food / pain log. Do it every day no matter what. It may take a week, months or a year but it will uncover something that will help reduce frequency. Also, listen to your body. I had numerous doctors tell me I didn't have any food allergies and to focus on other areas for relief. Every single one was wrong and I could have had a cure years previous.
I've heard coffee can relieve migraines, including from a friend that has migraines and doesn't like coffee, and other people with migraines and these people don't know each others.
I've not read on the topic, at this point I wouldn't rule out the placebo effect, and it seems in your case coffee wasn't helping you, but it would be interesting to know if coffee caused migraines in you without the gluten.
At one point, if I drunk a coffee just before a migraine started it would go away. Nothing scientific here but it happenned too many times (both had the coffee and didn't) to establish the result for me.
My migraines stopped when I went carnivore which meant no gluten and sugar as well (though I kept the coffee). I'm now in a more keto diet but still no gluten at all and I've only had a couple of light migraines in a year or so (used have them a monthly or more frequently).
It is interesting to know your case as it is a smaller dietary change than mine.
Since I dropped caffeine, my migraines also became much less frequent and when I have some caffeine, I am at risk for getting one. It seems closely related to sleep for me and caffeine (even in moderation) just greatly affects my quality of sleep.
Same for me. As a Brazilian, I’ve always drank coffee without much care, but eventually I started limiting it to mornings.
Then I noticed if I ever forget to drink coffee (or had decaf coffee instead) I’d have a headache in the afternoon.
My solution was to remove caffeine completely, now I only drink decaf coffee and this particular problem disappeared after a few days.
Now about auras, it’s hard to say if there was any effect as they’re more rare for me. This thread is the first time I’ve read people say they drank coffee after the symptoms show up and it can block the headache that comes later on.
When I read stories like his, I always wonder what we’re doing with our wheat that so many people become completely wheat-intolerant in just 15 years. It is clearly more than just fashion, clearly people can diagnose it themselves and it happened in the anglo-saxon world first.
I can agree that for me it was cutting my "wheat" (flour, gluten, etc) consumption that helped me have far less migraines over all. I don't really eat much processed sugar (however I used to when I was a kid). I have taken away caffeine and brought it back without much change in frequency. The hardest part for me was a manager one time thinking it was how much I wasn't spending on doctors to poke/prod/image my head to find the cause or take a new medicine that really angered me. Dealing with people who can't understand that I have no control over when they happen and go away is the worst.
I just started noticing this and I am in the exact same spot, no allergies, lots of migraines.
Thank you for posting this 'cause I though I was making things up by noticing things when all tests were negative.
edit:
though it seems to me that coffe(+iburprofen when things are bad) helps.
I started connecting it to food when I noticed I started getting pain on my lower back that slowly creeps up on the course of half a day or so and becomes a migraine. When it starts stopping and I massage my neck down to half my back I get tons of relief when I press on the right nerve/muscle/whatever.
I tried everything over the years - stopping smoking, removing amalgam fillings etc etc.
Reducing sugar has really helped me, although I take propranolol daily and have rizatriptan to hand if need be.
Used to get chronic paroxysmal hemicrania too - ended up having emergency surgery on an impacted wisdom tooth, ended up in ICU for 4 days but haven't had one of those headaches since.
Definitely always believed I have some trigeminal nerve deformity.
I have gotten migraines (a visual aura followed by a horrible headache) on and off for years. Some years I’d have a couple, some years I’d have none at all. I have always tried to trace it back to a common theme. For the longest time I thought that common theme was caffeine.. to the point that I quit caffeine for like a year. Unfortunately, I still ended up with a migraine! One day I realized something, maybe my migraines had nothing to do with caffeine but everything to do with electrolyte balance. I recalled the many days I’ve had migraines and besides caffeine, the other common theme was that I had drank a significant amount of water. Sparkling water especially, I can pretty much just guzzle all day because I never get bored or sick of it. Sense then, I’ve made sure that if I drink a lot of water I also throw in some LMNT or similar electrolyte powder in there. I’ve been able to enjoy coffee again without the migraine. YMMV!
It was similar for me. I'd get migraines a few times a year. I couldn't find any food correlation, but it seemed to often happen the day after doing strenuous activity, sweating a lot and drinking a lot of water. I started to suspect it was related to lack of electrolytes, so I began taking electrolyte solution after running or any other sweaty activity. In the few years since then, the migraines have been much less frequent, and about half as intense.
I will have to give this a shot for my personal migraines. I do a lot of physical exercise when not on the computer. I also drink plenty of water so I am hydrated before exercising (I can't stand to drink water while working out). I live in a country with a high salt consumption but maybe I am not getting enough electrolytes. I can't honestly say caffeine has any noticeable effect on my frequency though.
It's cool to see some progress on aural migraines.
In the past I tried zolmitriptans for it but they don't do much, same with milder pain killers.
My migraines started at 20, two decades ago. I remember the first one like it was yesterday. I was studying CS and was coding on a dark-mode CRT monitor with a big fat window reflection on the screen.
It always happen the same way, with the characteristic jiggles, some kind of colorful, moving patterns of light that start in the center of my vision, slowly expanding to my entire field of view, making me temporarily blind. Then 30 mns after the onset of that, gone. 30 more minutes and the headache + strong nausea start, and immense fatigue. At that point I'm out of commission for a good 12h. Meaning I better be close to my bed, in total darkness.
It really sucks. I used to have them every 3 months on the dot, like on a timer. As I'm getting older I'm having less and less of them, going about a year without one. And they are a lot milder now. I have a lot less of the jiggles, no nausea and the headache is not so bad. I'm still fatigued but usually recover the same day. I consider myself lucky.
It seems to run in my family.
I've tried finding a trigger for the migraines but I have no clue. I used to associate them with bright lights as there is usually a bright light present when they happen, but it needs some other element. Stress and fatigue appear to be factors, as are tanins contained in red wine and beer. But sometimes none of these elements were present.
I have a personal non-scientific theory that serotonin levels play a role. High levels like I think I had when I was younger tend to trigger migraines. As I'm getting older and grumpier, I probably have low serotonin and less migraines...
Same, with aura, but without bad headache symptoms beyond a 3/10 on the pain scale. I use to have them monthly, almost on the dot. Unrelated to them, I started taking Magnesium supplements and now rarely ever have aura migraines. Kinda crazy how well it worked for me. Also could never really figure out the “precipitating factors” but bright light was almost always the direct trigger.
Thanks for sharing. I have the same “bright lights” hypothesis. If I see something bright I close my eyes until it feels like it’s passed. Seems to work, but who knows until I get my next one.
I’m also realizing in my late-30s that I have at least some form of dyslexia - I used to think Ambien made me hallucinate letters dancing on the page, but it’s my eye muscles and happens most when I’m tired.
I wonder if there are multiple different causes. Because I have had migraines regularly since I was a little kid and sleep was the only cure. (Hours of crying until I'd pass out) But when I got to a teen I tried every pain killer I could find and finally I found that none of them helped unless I took it very early when the pain started. (Within maybe 30-40 min) And even then only ibuprofen worked. (And I have to take quite a bit) But even then the pain doesn't go away for some time. But at least it doesn't get any worse.
So I keep ibuprofen in every car, bag, and a few places around the house.
OTC medication is not typically strong enough to fully fend off a migraine (no, excedrin migraine doesn’t count). Go see a doctor, explain your symptoms etc and get prescribed something like rizatriptan.
Seconding Rizatriptan. It's a game changer. It also seems to work better earlier, before the pounding really sets in, but in the worst case it still turns it down a lot.
In addition to triptans, there's another class of migraine medication that's relatively new, but given the cost and back and forth your doctor will have to do, they prefer to start with triptans: *gepant drugs like Nurtec and Ubrelvy.
Emphasis on the "something like": there are several different drugs in this class (triptans), and it might take a couple of tries to get one that works for you.
Personally, sumatriptan doesn't work reliably, rizatriptan makes me feel super woozy, but eletriptan works well and without noticeable side effects.
For all of the other folks here saying ibuprofen isn't strong enough: I have the same, and only with ibuprofen (vs. other over-the-counter drugs like aspirin or paracetemol): if I catch it early enough, sometimes it staves off the full blown migraine development.
I've had migraines since childhood, fortunately only every couple months for 2-4 hours. Weirdly, I'm so used to the pain at this point that I kind of take it in stride.
The downside is that ibuprofen also often upsets my stomach, and in the bad ones, I barf from the pain, so there's a gamble as to which route to go down.
This is similar to my symptoms. So far I haven't found any over the counter painkiller that helps me reliably. At least not in the doses you're supposed to take.
A few years ago I read something about a theory that migraines have to do with the body's heat regulation, and it was suggested to try a hot shower. That does seem to help me. So nowadays when I get a migraine (thankfully only about five times per year or so) I run a hot bath and stay in the tub for two to three hours. It's not fun, and for the first few minutes the headache gets worse and really starts pounding (blood pressure changes due to the heat maybe? I don't know). But then the heat does seem to take a lot of the edge off, and after a while the pain actually stops. Which it doesn't reliably do with painkillers only. Much better than lying around in bed, unable to sleep.
Not medical advice, your mileage will vary. But might be something others would want to try. If you're going to suffer and wait for it to stop, you might as well consider doing that in the bath.
I semi-regularly get migraines, maybe a handful a year.
Nearly every time it's associated with a night of insomnia - I do everything the same, no coffee or alcohol or anything, no late work or screens. The same bedtime routine, I just.... don't sleep.
I'm not sure how to draw the line of cause/effect between the two. Is the lack of sleep causing a migraine the next morning? Or is the insomnia some symptom of whatever then becomes the symptom of a migraine.
Or even if such a line exists, I think the association is strong enough the two are related, but I know memory and the brain making things fit patterns can be misleading.
I, of course, cannot provide medical advice, but I have had chronic migraines since I was a teenager. Over the years, I've identified several triggers and tend to categorize them; lack of sleep is common. Of course, a complete night of restlessness is fraught with many problems, but I can almost always guarantee that a migraine will be one of them.
I (late 30’s male) grew up with migraine and ultimately discovered that they were triggered by caffeine mixed with dehydration and/or chocolate.
Having discovered this I’ve been able to control them completely, but realize that not everyone’s triggers are the same.
I carry sumatriptan just in case but have never felt as though it’s made a difference. I’m always hopeful for more solutions to migraines for those who suffer
I was getting migraines regularly most Mondays until I finally realized that it was tied to chocolate. I ate chocolate on weekends. I stopped eating chocolate and they went away. Now I never get migraines unless I have chocolate. It is likely the caffeine. I don't consume any other caffeine.
Note that there are theories that migraines start long before an actual attack, and that with this migraine comes certain cravings.
I'm other words, one might crave chocolate and coffee due to the migraine, and only later get symptoms, thereby causing us to believe that there's a causation.
I’ve read enough people say they went coffee free and it helped that I don’t think the craving thing holds up, but I can see it happening in a different symptom: some people say the trigger is like bright lights, but I actually think the upcoming headache may be the one causing the light sensitivity, which would lead us to “remember” the bright lights.
Strange how this has so many different kind of triggers for different people. Makes me wonder if this really one phenomenon, or multiple with similar symptoms.
For me, it took years to identify two triggers: Relieve from stress, and overly exhausting sports or sauna. I used to have a stressful job, and regular intensive training on sunday mornings, and would very often get migraine at exactly 4pm. Since changing the job and doing moderate sports, it became much more infrequent.
Also, I have never had an optical aura. But I have observed yawning, and an increased sensitivity in my nasal passages (basically I feel every breath much more detailed, but not painful) as forewarnings.
"Triggers" are a red herring, there's way too much focus on them. The trigger is merely the final straw, the real problem is everything that came before.
I had headaches diagnosed as migraines since I was a kid, for 40+ years. It got to a point where I had scale 9 headaches for most days of some weeks and it was a tough going. Lots of doctors, some pain relief, but ultimately, no help. Then, in desperation, I tried drinking water. Headaches had been accompanied by the feeling of hunger/thirst and I thought to drink until it went away. I brought home a six-liter pack of mineral water and drank it all in 24 hours. And no more headaches. Nowadays I always have a bottle of water at hand consuming at least 1.5 liters a day. Nights are punctuated by visits to the loo, but I can live with that.
Reading other comments, I suppose migraines are a systemic issue, where something in the body is out of balance which manifests itself as an headache. And the medical science is really not very good with systemic issues: heart surgery has made great strides, but where nervous system meets the digestive system meets the limbic system etc, they struggle. Also, I think there’s an interesting aspect of level of detail of sensitivity here. Turns out my bouts of hunger were actually thirst. Since then, endurance sports have introduced me to an even wider gamut of ways the body might ask for different things. So maybe it’s about our ability to recognize and therefore correct imbalances in the body?
Readit News
For me, Rizatriptan helped take the edge off pain but I always had more migraines than pills could safely relieve in any given month. In the end, most months I had to choose whether I would get relief in the moment or save the 1-2 remaining pills for the following week(s) before a refill.
I had every blood / allergy test available and none ever showed any issues. I thought there may be a correlation to gluten but there were times where gluten (bread) helped with the nausea side effects.
Ultimately, I gave up gluten, coffee and sugar all at once. Within weeks I felt better and suffered no migraines for over a year until I decided to test the waters with a flour tortilla. Within a few hours I was bed ridden with a migraine for 2-3 days.
I have worked sugar back in to my diet in moderation but gluten and coffee are still out. I have only had that one migraine in 3+ years.
Anyone suffering, the absolute best advice I ever got was to keep a food / pain log. Do it every day no matter what. It may take a week, months or a year but it will uncover something that will help reduce frequency. Also, listen to your body. I had numerous doctors tell me I didn't have any food allergies and to focus on other areas for relief. Every single one was wrong and I could have had a cure years previous.
I've not read on the topic, at this point I wouldn't rule out the placebo effect, and it seems in your case coffee wasn't helping you, but it would be interesting to know if coffee caused migraines in you without the gluten.
Now, going on without coffee is nice too!
It is interesting to know your case as it is a smaller dietary change than mine.
Then I noticed if I ever forget to drink coffee (or had decaf coffee instead) I’d have a headache in the afternoon.
My solution was to remove caffeine completely, now I only drink decaf coffee and this particular problem disappeared after a few days.
Now about auras, it’s hard to say if there was any effect as they’re more rare for me. This thread is the first time I’ve read people say they drank coffee after the symptoms show up and it can block the headache that comes later on.
Thank you for posting this 'cause I though I was making things up by noticing things when all tests were negative.
edit: though it seems to me that coffe(+iburprofen when things are bad) helps.
I started connecting it to food when I noticed I started getting pain on my lower back that slowly creeps up on the course of half a day or so and becomes a migraine. When it starts stopping and I massage my neck down to half my back I get tons of relief when I press on the right nerve/muscle/whatever.
Reducing sugar has really helped me, although I take propranolol daily and have rizatriptan to hand if need be.
Used to get chronic paroxysmal hemicrania too - ended up having emergency surgery on an impacted wisdom tooth, ended up in ICU for 4 days but haven't had one of those headaches since.
Definitely always believed I have some trigeminal nerve deformity.
In the past I tried zolmitriptans for it but they don't do much, same with milder pain killers.
My migraines started at 20, two decades ago. I remember the first one like it was yesterday. I was studying CS and was coding on a dark-mode CRT monitor with a big fat window reflection on the screen.
It always happen the same way, with the characteristic jiggles, some kind of colorful, moving patterns of light that start in the center of my vision, slowly expanding to my entire field of view, making me temporarily blind. Then 30 mns after the onset of that, gone. 30 more minutes and the headache + strong nausea start, and immense fatigue. At that point I'm out of commission for a good 12h. Meaning I better be close to my bed, in total darkness.
It really sucks. I used to have them every 3 months on the dot, like on a timer. As I'm getting older I'm having less and less of them, going about a year without one. And they are a lot milder now. I have a lot less of the jiggles, no nausea and the headache is not so bad. I'm still fatigued but usually recover the same day. I consider myself lucky.
It seems to run in my family.
I've tried finding a trigger for the migraines but I have no clue. I used to associate them with bright lights as there is usually a bright light present when they happen, but it needs some other element. Stress and fatigue appear to be factors, as are tanins contained in red wine and beer. But sometimes none of these elements were present.
I have a personal non-scientific theory that serotonin levels play a role. High levels like I think I had when I was younger tend to trigger migraines. As I'm getting older and grumpier, I probably have low serotonin and less migraines...
I’m also realizing in my late-30s that I have at least some form of dyslexia - I used to think Ambien made me hallucinate letters dancing on the page, but it’s my eye muscles and happens most when I’m tired.
Dead Comment
So I keep ibuprofen in every car, bag, and a few places around the house.
In addition to triptans, there's another class of migraine medication that's relatively new, but given the cost and back and forth your doctor will have to do, they prefer to start with triptans: *gepant drugs like Nurtec and Ubrelvy.
Personally, sumatriptan doesn't work reliably, rizatriptan makes me feel super woozy, but eletriptan works well and without noticeable side effects.
I've had migraines since childhood, fortunately only every couple months for 2-4 hours. Weirdly, I'm so used to the pain at this point that I kind of take it in stride.
The downside is that ibuprofen also often upsets my stomach, and in the bad ones, I barf from the pain, so there's a gamble as to which route to go down.
A few years ago I read something about a theory that migraines have to do with the body's heat regulation, and it was suggested to try a hot shower. That does seem to help me. So nowadays when I get a migraine (thankfully only about five times per year or so) I run a hot bath and stay in the tub for two to three hours. It's not fun, and for the first few minutes the headache gets worse and really starts pounding (blood pressure changes due to the heat maybe? I don't know). But then the heat does seem to take a lot of the edge off, and after a while the pain actually stops. Which it doesn't reliably do with painkillers only. Much better than lying around in bed, unable to sleep.
Not medical advice, your mileage will vary. But might be something others would want to try. If you're going to suffer and wait for it to stop, you might as well consider doing that in the bath.
A neurologist prescribed me Metagelan.
Any side effects you got from Metagelan?
Any idea how/why it works for you?
Nearly every time it's associated with a night of insomnia - I do everything the same, no coffee or alcohol or anything, no late work or screens. The same bedtime routine, I just.... don't sleep.
I'm not sure how to draw the line of cause/effect between the two. Is the lack of sleep causing a migraine the next morning? Or is the insomnia some symptom of whatever then becomes the symptom of a migraine.
Or even if such a line exists, I think the association is strong enough the two are related, but I know memory and the brain making things fit patterns can be misleading.
The insomnia probably doesn't help, but it is likely an advance symptom instead of the cause.
Having discovered this I’ve been able to control them completely, but realize that not everyone’s triggers are the same.
I carry sumatriptan just in case but have never felt as though it’s made a difference. I’m always hopeful for more solutions to migraines for those who suffer
I'm other words, one might crave chocolate and coffee due to the migraine, and only later get symptoms, thereby causing us to believe that there's a causation.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
For me, it took years to identify two triggers: Relieve from stress, and overly exhausting sports or sauna. I used to have a stressful job, and regular intensive training on sunday mornings, and would very often get migraine at exactly 4pm. Since changing the job and doing moderate sports, it became much more infrequent.
Also, I have never had an optical aura. But I have observed yawning, and an increased sensitivity in my nasal passages (basically I feel every breath much more detailed, but not painful) as forewarnings.
Reading other comments, I suppose migraines are a systemic issue, where something in the body is out of balance which manifests itself as an headache. And the medical science is really not very good with systemic issues: heart surgery has made great strides, but where nervous system meets the digestive system meets the limbic system etc, they struggle. Also, I think there’s an interesting aspect of level of detail of sensitivity here. Turns out my bouts of hunger were actually thirst. Since then, endurance sports have introduced me to an even wider gamut of ways the body might ask for different things. So maybe it’s about our ability to recognize and therefore correct imbalances in the body?