Chronic Migraine Headaches and High Blood Pressure
Headaches all suck. Migraines even more so.
Considering that I’ve written a book on migraines, I understand how blood vessel health and migraines are connected more than most other physicians.
Most doctors don’t ever link the blood vessels and brain problems like chronic migraines together. So instead of treating the blood vessels, they use medications only designed to block the actual headache and not fix the problem.
Some blood pressure meds make the underlying problem worse. Go figure.
The important thing to understand is that migraines are NOT a problem in the brain. In order to fix the brain, you must fix the body.
If you are a migraine sufferer, then the recommendations in the next section of this article will apply to you.
Make these changes and there is a VERY good chance your chronic migraine headaches will go away forever.
High Blood Pressure and Your Shrinking Brain
The brain is probably THE organ that takes the brunt of the damage from high blood pressure.
The is because the brain requires a tremendous amount of energy. To produce this energy, the brain needs a boatload of building blocks like amino acids, nutrients and vitamins. It also needs a way to get waste products away from the brain.
Enter the blood vessels. Blood vessel health is critical for making sure the brain gets what it needs.
For this reason, it would make sense that poor blood vessel health, as seen in high blood pressure, would slowly damage the brain.
And this damage would be worse as you get older because all the cells in your body lose resilience as they age.
Which is why the results of one study looking at brain atrophy (shrinking) in the elderly should come as no surprise.
These results show that if blood pressure levels are closer to the higher end of normal, even healthy people without high blood pressure are more likely to have a shrinking brain than those with lower blood pressure numbers.
Is Lower Blood Pressure Always Better?
Mainstream medicine spends a typical office visit looking for problems that can be fixed with medications.
But just because we find something a little bit off of normal does not mean that it’s broken. Blood pressure will naturally rise over the decades. Just like the soft tissues of your joints and ligaments, blood vessels age with time.
As you age, your blood vessels will inevitably become a little stiffer, leading to higher blood pressure.
Another thing to consider—it is possible that you will need a little higher blood pressure as you age to push blood and nutrients to the tissues that need them.
I can tell you that from experiences in my office that not all patients feel better when their blood pressure is forced to a “normal” of 120/80 with more medication.
It is not unusual for these patients to feel disoriented and unsteady at this blood pressure.
With this in mind, the results found by researchers looking at the relationship between blood pressure on brain function should not be a surprise.
They found that mild high blood pressure led to better brain function in a group of elderly patients 70-85 years of age.
This is just the information I have been searching for! Thank you, Dr. Bogash.