- Head or neck injury
- Some pain disorders
- Obesity
- Asthma
- Snoring
Overdoing it with medication, such as migraine-treatment drugs, you might be required or suggested to take, can heighten your risk of HFEM or chronic migraine.
Your best bet would be to stay on top of all the prescription and over-the-counter medications you take. If you begin to take into account an unhealthy boost in migraine frequency, keep your doctor in the loop. They may recommend an alternative medicine to subsidize any chance of migraine attacks getting progressively worse.
Identifying The Source of Recurring Episodic Migraines
What is the main blame for a migraine on a general scale is not as simple as it seems, and doctors can’t even entirely wrap their heads around it. Headaches often happen when specific nerves in your blood vessels deliver pain signals to your brain. This leads to inflammatory substances going into your nerves and blood vessels, which as a result provokes a migraine attack. It’s not clear what makes your nerves do that.
In the circumstance of HFEM, various factors can trigger a spike in the frequency and severity of your migraine attacks.
These include:
- Anxiety
- Drastic hormonal transitions in women
- Bright or flashing lights
- Loud noises
- Potent odors
- Medications
- Too much or insufficient sleep
- Sudden shifts in weather or environment
- Too much physical activity or fitness
- Tobacco
- Caffeine or caffeine withdrawal
- Skipping meals
- Medicine overuse
- Food allergies
RELATED: Migraines: Why Do They Start & How to End Them
Getting Diagnosed for High-Frequency Episodic Migraine As A Black Individual
Only 47 percent of Black patients with headaches get their official headache diagnosis versus 70 percent of Caucasians. Latinos with headaches have 50 percent less of a likelihood of getting a migraine diagnosis than white patients. This is because patients lacking a proper migraine diagnosis are unable to get the migraine-specific therapy they need.
Just 14 percent of Black headache patients get prescribed acute migraine medications, as opposed to 37 percent of white headache patients.
The most important thing you can do is empower yourself with information and be your own healthcare advocate.
If you experience a migraine, determining which type can help you narrow down what your treatment plan looks like. To distinguish whether it’s LFEM or HFEM, your doctor may ask you:
- How many migraines do you get per month?
- How intense and recurring are they?
- If you have your menstrual cycle, did you get yours around the time of the migraines?
- Describe the form and region of the headache — is it a pounding, pulsing, or throbbing pain?
- How long does it last?
- Are there specific hobbies, foods, stressors, or scenarios that trigger your migraines?
- Do you take medicine for pain relief? Do they function?
- How often do you ingest medicine?
- Describe how you felt before, during, and following the migraine.
BlackDoctor.Org highly recommends investing in a migraine journal to jot down every detail of the times, dates, and symptoms before, during, and after an attack to get closer to a more accurate diagnosis.