Vestibular Symptoms, Especially Dizziness, Linked With Migraine
Dizziness and vertigo were significantly related to migraine headaches in a study of nurses at a tertiary hospital in Beijing, China. Researchers published their findings online in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
“In 2012, the Bárány Society first proposed and formulated the definition and diagnostic criteria of vestibular migraine and probable vestibular migraine,” wrote the research team from Peking University in Beijing. “Since then, the correlation between vestibular symptoms and headache has attracted much more attention from clinicians.”
To further explore associations among vestibular symptoms and migraine, as well as nonmigraine, headache researchers surveyed 708 female nurses on their general physical condition, vestibular symptoms, and headache history.
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The incidence of migraine was 13.3%, according to the study. Meanwhile, the incidence of dizziness was 24.44%, and the incidence of vertigo was 13.56%.
Dizziness and vertigo were both independently linked with migraine and other types of headache, according to the study. Compared with respondents who did not experience dizziness, respondents with dizziness had an 8.25 times greater risk of migraine and a 5.73 times greater risk of other types of headache. Respondents with vertigo showed 2.81 times greater risk of migraine and a 2.53 times greater risk of other types of headache compared with those without vertigo.
“Compared with patients with vertigo, patients with dizziness were more likely to be accompanied by migraine,” researchers wrote. “This suggested that when diagnosing vestibular migraine according to current criteria, some patients with nonvertigo vestibular symptoms might be missed.”
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