Obesity May Raise Headache Risk

"Being overweight or obese may increase the likelihood of having severe headaches and migraines, new study findings suggest. An increased prevalence of headache may be associated with being underweight as well. In analyses of 7,601 adult men and women, Dr. Earl S. Ford and colleagues at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, report that being overweight or obese increased the likelihood of headache by 1.2- to nearly 1.4-times. Ford's group investigated association between body mass index (BMI), the ratio between height and weight often used to determine the weight range an individual falls into, and headache among men and women, 20 years of age or older, who participated in the 1999 to 2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Overall, about 15 percent of the men and 28 percent of the women reported they had severe headaches or migraines during the previous 3 months, the researchers report in the medical journal Cephalalgia. ‘If obesity increases the risk for headaches, weight management might be a useful approach in headache management,’ Ford and colleagues suggest. They also recommend further analyses to establish ‘whether obesity is causally related to the development of headaches.’”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081209/hl_nm/us_obesity_headache