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In spite of COVID-19 and its impact on many of our programs, we have continued to focus our efforts on a variety of initiatives and have made great strides.

Alexes’ experience is both interesting and complicated. She lives with rare debilitating types of migraine. The presentation of symptoms impacts her daily life, including loss of fine motor skills, insufferable pain in her head and body and aphasia.

In 2013, Melissa Dwyer lost her battle to chronic migraine. In her last year, Melissa had over 70 inpatient hospital days to try to break her migraine attacks. Each and every day she lived in excruciating pain. The pain and symptoms stopped her from living the life every 22-year-old deserves.

Lindsay had chronic daily migraine from her earliest memory (around the age of 3 or 4) until she was 30. She inherited the disease from her father. Years of daily migraine led her to develop complex regional pain syndrome (a constant pain like burning fire down to her bones) on the right side of her face, head, neck, and down her right arm. She was underweight throughout most of her twenties due to severe nausea and vomiting caused by migraine attacks. She even experienced a migraine-related seizure that stopped her breathing. She is currently episodic.

Migraine entered my life in college and grew progressively until it ultimately ended my career. The life I had carefully built over several decades crumbled as migraine made a career focused on deadlines, schedules, and meetings impossible to maintain.

I dealt with menstrual headaches as a teenager, but nothing like the pain I started to experience while serving in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December 1990.

TACs are characterized by attacks of pain on one side of the head along with autonomic symptoms on the same side, such as a tearing, red eye, stuffy or runny nose, and facial sweating.

Migraine disease can be challenging to treat, but it may be even more complicated for patients who have also dealt with concussions and/or PTSD. Current evidence suggests that having one of those conditions puts a patient at risk for more complicated, intractable symptoms for the other conditions.

There are numerous barriers preventing cluster headache patients from getting a timely and correct diagnosis, let alone accessing the most effective treatment—high-flow oxygen therapy.

I am a 41-year old woman living in sunny California, with a wonderful family and a great job. Sounds idyllic, right? The problem is if you look closely, you would see that I am tired and frustrated from my fifteen-year battle with migraine.

Summer can be a tricky season for those managing migraine. So how can we continue to enjoy ourselves and live life to the fullest without triggering symptoms? Here are some tips that may help.

I hid my illness for more years than I can count. I hid the pain, the vomiting, and the vertigo. Now there are two perfect little souls looking to me to shape their world. Being a parent at all with migraine makes you a superhero

Why cluster headaches are linked to seasonal changes is likely due to the length of the days. How much sunlight there is in a day changes as the seasons shift, making nights shorter and days longer or vice versa.

Why are we as a community of people with migraine so averse to light? At least 40% of us have photophobia to some extent, but none of us really understand it.

If you ask most of us, we can likely list numerous “types of migraine” that we experience. Some make us dizzy, cause us to speak unintelligibly…

The years of migraine flying under the radar are behind us. Though there is still much progress to be made, the last few years have been some of the most monumental we’ve seen for the migraine community, making us all the more excited for 2020.

  As the year comes to a close, we are recapping the five highest viewed blog posts from 2019…   1. Pregnancy and Migraine Medications Pregnancy is a step into the unknown. It can be the most wonderful time in a person’s life, but it can also be intimidating. For women living with migraine disease, contemplating pregnancy can be downright

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Healthcare costs are 70% higher for a family that includes a person with migraine; however, many of these costs can be covered for older adults under Medicare.

2018 may have been a pivotal year in migraine treatment with the release of CGRP monoclonal antibodies, but that was merely the first wave of new treatments for people with migraine disease. As 2019 winds down, there are more promising treatments in the pipeline than ever before, all aiming at different targets in the migraine process. Some are new kinds of medications that may abort or prevent attacks with fewer risks than other currently available treatments. Others are neuromodulators, devices that patients can apply externally to disrupt the electrical signals during migraine attacks. 

It wasn’t like I had a brain tumor. This is what I remember most from my first trip to the student health center the first semester of my freshman year.  The doctor loudly exclaiming outside my small sterile examining room that “it wasn’t like [I] had a brain tumor.”

Why? A simple and poignant question. It has been a breakthrough for so many. A three-letter word that cuts toward the core of understanding. I have heard both theoretical scientists and three-year-olds use this same question. Each trying to desperately grow their minds by willing it towards understanding the world around them. The day I asked the question of, why, on the side of a Tennessee path I was searching for the answers to why my stomach had revolted abruptly and violently. Leaving an otherwise patch of dry leaves moist and putrefied. The immediate causes I tried to line out but the solution still eludes me today. Even through the leaves and my unavailable powers of divination, I could see that my day was done. The “why?” of being there was easy. I have believed for some time that there is a need to show others the impact of migraine. I use arduous efforts of physical endurance to strike conversations about migraine.