If you search “cheese” in the medical journal Cephalalgia, you find lots of patients associating it as a cause for migraines. One article points to how difficult it is to make the scientific connection between how certain peoples’ bodies are dealing with certain foods and how exactly it is related to getting the headache. What is the biochemical action happening to cause this? There are ideas, experiments and efforts and just not the clear results sought after yet. I am pasting in part of that article and below that is an article citation on the DNA mechanisms related to Migraine Headache and Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome.
One thought: if your body is not dealing with a complicated food well for whatever reason, you wouldn’t necessarily then say, well what other complicated food can I eat in its place. You might say I am going to try sticking primarily with simple foods, that have not been manipulated or complicated.
IgG-mediated allergy: A new mechanism for migraine attacks?
Julio Pascual and
Agustín Oterino
+ Author Affiliations
University Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla, Spain.
Julio Pascual, Service of Neurology, University Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla, 39008 Santander, Spain. Email: juliopascual@telefonica.net
Despite recent advances offered by modern neuroimaging and genetic techniques, the pathophysiology of migraine has not been fully clarified. As pointed out by Selby and Lance 50 years ago, a relevant proportion of patients report that their migraine attacks are usually precipitated by dietary items (1). In a survey analysing the prevalence of dietary migraine in 500 new migraine patients, Peatfield et al. found in 1984 that 19.2% of migraine patients reported sensitivity to cheese, 18.2% to chocolate ad 11.1% to citrus fruit (2)….One of the obstacles to acceptance of the dietary hypothesis is the lack of a clear scientific explanation of the mechanisms implicated in the development of migraine attacks supposedly precipitated by food. The first obvious proposed mechanism was an allergy mediated by IgE antibodies…
Citation of another interesting article:
Two Common Mitochondrial DNA Polymorphisms are Highly Associated with Migraine Headache and Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2982.2008.01793.x Cephalalgia July 2009 vol. 29 no. 7 719-728 authors: EA Zaki,
T Freilinger, T Klopstock, EE Baldwin, KRU Heisner, K Adams, M Dichgans, S Wagler and RG Boles; Author Affiliations
Division of Medical Genetics and the Saban Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany
Friedrich-Baur-Institute
current address Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles
Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome Association, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Department of Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Division of Medical Genetics, Box 90, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90027, USA. Tel. +1-323-361-2178, fax +1-323-361-1172, e-mail rboles@chla.usc.edu
