Wednesday, July 1, 2009

More Cigarettes More Health Problems

A recent study found that smokers have more migraine attacks than non-smokers. But a research published in The Journal of Headache and Pain indicated that smoking could ameliorate migraines by reducing anxiety, one of the main factors that spark an attack.
One advantage of this study is that the sample used, 361 medicine students from the University of Salamanca, were fully informed about what a migraine was. Most surveys which studied the migraine in smokers are done in people without knowledge of the illness, but this recent study tried to found about the presence or absence of migraine and whether or not they smoked in people knowing everything about this disease.
At the end of the investigation was found that 16% of students fulfilled migraine criteria, while 20% smoked. But the percentage of smokers was higher (29%) in those who were also migraine sufferers and migraine frequency in those students who were migraine sufferers and smokers was clearly higher than in those who were non-smokers and migraine sufferers.
According to this last study, smoking is a precipitating factor of this type of headache, as the influence of active smokers is one third higher in migraine sufferers and there is a direct relationship between the number of cigarettes smoked and the frequency of migraine attacks.
At the end of the study researchers became more stressed, because they assure that the tobacco dosage play a very important role in migraine sufferers. The study results detected that the migraine sets in after five daily cigarettes.
Moreover, although the percentage of those who smoked was higher in people with migraines, they smoked less than those who did not suffer migraines. This is because they knew that if they will smoke more than five cigarettes a day, they would be more likely to have a migraine attack.
The neurologists argued that in no case should a migraine sufferer be advised to smoke thinking that it is going to improve their migraines.