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Chronic headaches may predict men's stroke risk

Last Updated: 2003-05-29 17:00:19 -0400 (Reuters Health)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Men who suffer from chronic headaches may be at increased risk of having a stroke, Finnish researchers report.

They say that chronic headaches could be a marker for the underlying disease process that leads to stroke.

In the study, Dr. Pekka Jousilahti of the University of Helsinki followed more than 35,000 Finnish men and women for up to 23 years and compared self-reports of headache at the start of the study with rates of first-time stroke during the follow-up.

One year into the study, the researchers found, men with chronic headaches -- defined as those who said they suffered headaches "often" -- were four times more likely to have a stroke compared with men without headaches.

As time went on, though, the stroke risk tied to chronic headache declined, according to the report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Five years into the study, men with chronic headaches were less than twice as likely as those with no headaches complaints to suffer a stroke.

Among women, who reported chronic headaches at nearly twice the rate of men -- 17 percent, versus nine percent -- there was only a "weak" relationship between headache and stroke risk, the researchers report.

According to the researchers, the association between chronic headache and stroke in men may, in part, be related to vascular damage caused by artery disease. Besides raising the risk of stroke, diseased, inflamed arteries might irritate sensitive nerves, leading to headache.

A limitation of the study, however, is that participants were not asked about symptoms of migraine, but only unspecified symptoms of headache, according to the researchers.

Previous studies have implicated migraine headaches in stroke risk.

"Thus we cannot estimate the proportion of stroke risk observed with headache that might be due to migraine," the authors note.

But the new findings do confirm those observed in another study conducted in the United States, according to Dr. Marc Fisher of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

"These two studies raise the intriguing likelihood that headache in general is associated with an increased stroke risk," he writes in an accompanying editorial.

"What remains uncertain is the explanation for this increased risk," Fisher adds.

He notes that the "most likely explanation" is that chronic headaches and stroke share a common underlying disorder.

But, he concludes, this and other possibilities "will need to be explored in further studies that carefully evaluate the type of headache patients have, (co-existing) conditions and medications consumed."

Copyright 2002 Reuters