Severe persistent migraines can affect emotional, interpersonal, social, and work-related functioning. It is difficult to learn how to cope with pain and improve your functioning on your own. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been proven to improve lives of people with pain, including migraine headaches and not only in adults, but also in children. One major problem with CBT is that it is not readily available in many areas and when available, it is expensive.

I’ve written about two online programs for CBT, which offer help to patients with anxiety and depression. Another online service painACTION.com offers free resources that have been shown to improve coping with pain, to decrease anxiety and depression, and to provide other benefits. The site offers help to patients with migraine, as well as cancer pain, back and arthritis pain, and neuropathic pain. The migraine section has five modules: communication skills, emotional coping, self-management skills, knowledge base, and medication safety.

I do have a problem with their medication safety section in that it does not mention caffeine and caffeine-containing drugs when describing rebound, or medication overuse headaches. These drugs include Excedrin, Anacin, Fiorinal, Fioricet, Esgic, and other. At the same time, they list aspirin, which actually may prevent medication overuse headaches and triptans, which rarely cause such headaches (one of my most popular posts is devoted to daily intake of triptans, which is not something I encourage, but which is the only solution for some patients).

But overall, this is a very useful resource for headache sufferers. To take full advantage of this site you need to go through multiple modules, preferably on a regular basis, say twice a week. It is also useful to keep going back to the old material since it is not easy to change faulty thought processes. The site has enough material to keep you engaged for many sessions. And if you do visit the site regularly you will find that your headaches may become more manageable and that they may have less of an impact on your life.

Vitamin D has been reported to be low in patients with migraines as well as a host of other medical conditions. The big question is whether this is just a coincidence or a cause-and-effect relationship. In some conditions, such as multiple sclerosis, people with higher vitamin D levels have fewer relapses than those with lower levels, indicating a direct benefit of vitamin D. In other diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, strokes, and migraine this relationship is not clear.

A new study by Iranian doctors published in BioMed Research International shows that vitamin D deficiency is found in about half of 105 migraine patients they tested. However, when they looked at 110 matched controls without migraines, they found that half of them were also deficient. They also found that those with more severe migraines did not have lower levels than those with milder ones. This strongly suggests that vitamin D has no effect on migraine headaches.

So if you suffer from migraines, do not expect vitamin D to improve your headaches. However, if your blood test shows a deficiency, you should definitely take a vitamin D supplement to avoid some known and possibly some yet unknown problems. Taking the daily recommended dose of 600 units may not be sufficient and you may need to recheck your level to make sure that you are absorbing it. Some of my patients have needed as much as 5,000 units daily to get their vitamin D level to normal range.

Many headache sufferers take over-the-counter medications which can cause upset stomach and heartburn due to reflux. Many will then resort to taking acid lowering drugs. These drugs reduce acidity which also impairs absorption of various vitamins and minerals, including vitamin B12, D, magnesium, and other. Magnesium deficiency is known to worsen migraine and cluster headaches.

The most popular drugs for indigestion, reflux, and stomach ulcers are so called proton-pump inhibitors, or PPIs (Prilosec, Protonix, Nexium, and other), and histamine 2 receptor antagonists (Zantac, Tagamet), and they are available by prescription and over the counter. Over 150 million prescriptions were written for PPIs alone last year.

A new study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. D. Corley and his colleagues shows that people who are taking these medications are more likely than the average person to be vitamin B12 deficient.

The study was performed at Kaiser Permanente. It involved 25,956 adults who were found to have vitamin B12 deficiency between 1997 and 2011, and who were compared with 184,199 patients without B12 deficiency during that period.

Patients who took acid lowering drugs for more than two years were 65 percent more likely to have a vitamin B12 deficiency. Higher doses of PPIs were more strongly associated with the vitamin deficiency, as well.

Twelve percent of patients deficient in vitamin B12 had used PPIs for two years or more, compared with 7.2 percent of control patients. The risk of deficiency was less pronounced among patients using drugs like Zantac and Tagamet long term: 4.2 percent, compared with 3.2 percent of nonusers.

The new study is the largest to date to demonstrate a link between taking acid suppressants and vitamin B12 deficiency across age groups. Earlier small studies focused primarily on the elderly.

The surprise was that the association was strongest in adults younger than age 30, since in the past only elderly were suspected to be at risk.

Vitamin B12 deficiency has been very common even in people not taking PPIs. This is in part due to healthier diets, which are often low in vitamin B12 which is found in high amounts in meat and liver. Vegetarians are particularly at risk.

Vitamin B12 deficiency is a serious condition, which in severe cases can be fatal. It can present with fatigue, memory impairment, tingling, weakness, dizziness, worsening headaches, anemia, and other symptoms.

Dr. Corley and his colleagues do not recommended stopping PPIs or similar drugs in people with clear need for these drugs. However, studies have found that the drugs are often overused or used for longer than necessary. One reason for this is that stopping PPIs often causes “rebound” increase in reflux making people think that they must continue taking these drugs. The way to get off PPIs is to first switch to Zantac and antacids, such as Tums or Mylanta. After a few weeks, stop taking Zantac and continue only antacids. Avoid eating foods that worsen reflux, such as chocolate, alcohol, and other, and you may need the antacids only occasionally.

Besides vitamin B12 deficiency, prolonged use of PPIs leads to other problems, including increased risk of bone fractures, pneumonia, and a serious gastro-ointestinal infection with C. difficile.

To see whether study patients were not just low in vitmain B12 but also had symptoms of deficiency, researchers reviewed the charts of 20 randomly selected PPI-using patients to determine why they had their vitamin B12 levels tested. Twenty five percent of that small sample had also been tested for anemia and 15 percent for memory loss. This indicates that many people with this deficiency have symptoms. However, because the symptoms are vague and not specific for this deficiency, doctors often ignore them and do not order any tests.

To complicate matters, when doctors do test for vitamin B12 deficiency, the test they use is not very accurate. Many laboratories list normal levels being between 200 and 1,000. However, many patients with levels below 400, and some even with levels above 400 still have a deficiency. If a deficiency is strongly suspected, additional tests are needed – homocysteine and methylmalonic acid levels.

Art credit: JulieMauskop.com

Another large scientific article on the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In this study by doctors at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital led by Dr. Andrew Hershey, CBT was combined with amitriptyline (an antidepressant used for the treatment of pain and headaches) and compared to headache education plus amitriptyline.

They enrolled 135 children (79% girls) aged 10 to 17 years who were diagnosed with chronic migraine (15 days with headaches per month or more) and who had migraine-related disability. The study was conducted between October 2006 and September 2012. An unusually large number of kids completed the trial – 129 completed 20-week follow-up and 124 completed 12-month follow-up.

The treatment consisted of ten CBT or 10 headache education sessions involving equivalent time and therapists’ attention. Each group received the same dose of amitriptyline per pound of weight.

The main end point was days with headache and the secondary end point was the disability score determined at 20 weeks. Durability was examined over the 12-month follow-up period.

The results at the 20-week end point showed that days with headache were reduced by 11.5 for the CBT plus amitriptyline group vs 6.8 for the headache education plus amitriptyline group. The disability score decreased by 53 points for the CBT group vs 39 points for the headache education group. At 12-month follow-up, 86% of the CBT group had a 50% or greater reduction in headache days vs 69% of the headache education group;

The authors concluded that among young persons with chronic migraine, the use of CBT plus amitriptyline resulted in greater reductions in days with headache and migraine-related disability compared with use of headache education plus amitriptyline. These findings support the efficacy of CBT in the treatment of chronic migraine in children and adolescents.

The accompanying editorial strongly endorsed the results of the study, which is only the last one of many studies showing the benefits of CBT with or without biofeedback in treating headaches in children and adults. The editorial also pointed out several obstacles to the implementation of these findings. First, many doctors do not refer their patients for CBT because they are not aware of these studies or, more often lack the time and the training to explain the benefits of CBT without implying that the headache is a purely psychological problem, which obviously it is not. Secondly, even if they do refer for CBT, less than half of children and adults actually pursue this treatment.

Most doctors usually just prescribe amitriptyline or an epilepsy drug used for chronic migraines. In my experience with adolescents, Botox provides excellent relief for chronic migraines in children as well as it does in adults, although Botox is approved by the FDA only for adults. Botox has far fewer side effects than medications and I find that it is well accepted and tolerated by kids as young as 10. However, I always start with dietary changes, sleep hygiene, exercise, supplements such as magnesium and CoQ10 and CBT, biofeedback or meditation. These measures alone are often sufficient to provide significant relief and in many children there is no need for medications or Botox.

Mindfulness appears to reduce the effect of pain on day-to-day functioning in adolescents, according to a new study published in The Journal of Pain by Canadian researchers. This was a scientifically rigorous study of 198 boys and girls aged 13 to 18 years. The researchers made an effort to recruit some children who meditated and some who did not. They were all subjected to the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure questionnaire and to the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (questions such as “When I have pain I feel I can’t stand it anymore). They were asked about their daily pains, such as headache, stomachache, tooth pain, muscle pain, back pain. They were also subjected to experimental pain, which was produced by submerging their hand into ice cold water. The results showed that mindfulness had a direct effect on pain interference with daily activity and an indirect effect on the experimental pain intensity and tolerance by producing less catastrophizing.

The good news is that mindfulness is something that can be learned by meditation and can be taught as part of a course of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Kids with migraines, headaches, and other pains should be always advised to start with meditation, biofeedback, or cognitive-behavioral therapy.

The risk of dying from a variety of causes can be reduced by exercise, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal. The effect of exercise was as strong as the effect of drugs for the prevention of diabetes, coronary heart disease, rehabilitation of stroke, and treatment of heart failure. The authors reviewed 305 previous trials that involved almost 340,000 people, making their findings very reliable.

Exercise has been also proven to prevent migraine headaches (see my previous post). This finding was based on a review of over 46,000 patient records, also a very large number that suggests a true effect. Most people don’t need these studies to convince them of the benefits – they know that exercise improves their headaches and makes them feel better. The most common problem is lack of time and motivation. However, headaches also cost time and reduce productivity, so exercising 30 minutes four days a week will save time.

Doctor recommendations often do influence their patients’ behavior and doctors need to remember to emphasize to their patients the importance of exercise, both for headaches and other conditions.