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No link found between migraine, heart disease in postmenopausal women

PHILADELPHIA — A link between migraine history and risk for stroke, heart attack and other CVD was not found in postmenopausal women, according to study results presented at the American Headache Society Annual Scientific Meeting.

“The evidence for the relationship between migraine and CVD has been conflicting, depending on aura status, age of the population and CVD outcomes examined. While risk appears to be the highest in younger women, the relationship has so far not been extensively examined in older postmenopausal women who are at the highest risk of experiencing CVD events,” Jelena M. Pavlovic, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues wrote.

They studied data from 71,441 women between 50 and 79 years of age, of whom 10.7% had history of migraine. There were more whites and Latinos in the migraine group and the group without migraine had more African Americans and Asian Americans.

Pavlovic and colleagues found that during 22 years of longitudinal follow up, there were 211 incident strokes in those women with migraine and 1,943 strokes in those without (P = .679) and 187 myocardial infarctions in patients with migraine vs. those without (P = .926).

 

A link between migraine history and risk for stroke, heart attack and other CVD was not found in postmenopausal women, according to study results presented at the American Headache Society Annual Scientific Meeting.

Source:Adobe

Researchers added that the trend continued across composite CVD events — angioplasty of coronary arteries, coronary bypass surgery, coronary heart disease, deep vein thrombosis, or pulmonary embolism — in women with history of migraine and in those without such a history (P = .793)

“As migraine is highly prevalent in the population these findings have significant public health implications,” Pavlovic and colleagues concluded – by Janel Miller

Reference: Pavlovic J, et al. The relationship between migraine and risk of cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women in the observational longitudinal cohort of the Women’s Health Initiative study. Presented at: American Headache Society Annual Scientific Meeting; July 11-14, 2019; Philadelphia.

Disclosures: Healio Primary Care was unable to determine Pavlovic’s relevant financial disclosures prior to publication.