The opportunity to reduce the danger is equally clear. The warning the Science and Security Board now sends is clear, the danger obvious and imminent.

It is two minutes to midnight, but the Doomsday Clock has ticked away from midnight in the past, and during the next year, the world can again move it further from apocalypse. All rights reserved.The failure of world leaders to address the largest threats to humanity’s future is lamentable-but that failure can be reversed. There's more about migraines, cluster headaches and timing at the Will Erwin Headache Research Center.Ĭopyright © 2023 HealthDay. 'More studies, with a larger number of participants, are required to confirm the links and understand the relationship,' she said. Even poor sleep quality - including too little or too much sleep or experiencing sleep disruptions - might drive up risk among those predisposed to such headaches. On the other hand, it could be that the cluster headache/migraine risk goes up when sleep disorders - like insomnia and sleep apnea - are already in play. On the one hand, severe headaches might very well undermine sleep. That connection 'may go both ways,' Sutherland said. Sutherland suggested that sleep patterns may ultimately be at the heart of the internal body clock's role when it comes to severe headache risk. She is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Genomics and Precision Health at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Heidi Sutherland wrote an editorial that accompanied the findings, which were published online Wednesday in the journal Neurology. 'We hope that future research will be able to identify how the time of day controls the headaches, and how we might be able to block this signal and thus prevent the headaches.' 'For many people there are simply some times of day where you are more likely to have headaches,' Burish said. It's involved in regulating 'a lot of things in your body, such as hunger, body temperature, and your circadian rhythm,' he said, and it seems to be important for both types of headaches. And those levels tended to dip during an actual migraine attack.Īs to what might explain the headache-body clock connection, Burish said that one theory is the possible role of a brain structure called the hypothalamus. The researchers also found that five of nine genes known to boost cluster headache risk - and 110 of 168 genes known to boost migraine risk - also function in accordance with the body's internal clock.Īnother finding: Urine samples indicated that migraine patients tend to have lower levels of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, compared to healthy patients. Meanwhile, the review of genetic studies linked both types of headaches to two genes that play a key role in regulating the body clock. Risk also tended to rise during the spring and fall.īy contrast, migraine risk was highest during the day, spiking during late morning hours and staying elevated until early evening. The second looked at 16 studies that investigated whether genes linked to functioning of the circadian clock might also be more prevalent among headache patients.īesides finding that headache timing does seem to track the body's internal clock for most cluster headache patients and half of those with migraines, the first review also uncovered specific risk patterns.įor example, studies showed that risk for a cluster headache spikes late at night and remains elevated until early morning. The first included 72 studies that examined headache timing in the context of the body's internal clock. So he and his colleagues decided to examine all the available scientific literature, focusing on two research groupings.

And while the connection was less clear with respect to migraines, evidence appeared to suggest that both 'headaches seem to happen at predictable times of day,' Burish added. Many of the reports seemed to establish that cluster headaches are 'a highly circadian disorder,' he said. He said his team's interest in conducting a study review on headache timing stemmed from their experience caring for headache patients as well as following published case reports.

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