OverTheHills
Senior Member
- Messages
- 465
- Location
- New Zealand
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeand...ut-migraines-but-were-in-too-much-pain-to-ask
Extracts:
One in seven people around the world suffer from migraine. In the UK, migraine has a crippling economic effect, with approximately 25m days lost every year, costing the country £2.3bn. But while the condition has been studied since the time of the ancient Greeks – who attempted to treat it with trepanning, by drilling a hole into the skull to release evil spirits – it remains poorly understood with few adequate treatments.
Why don’t we know more?
Serious research into migraine began only relatively recently, as for a long time many doctors believed that it was a psychosomatic condition produced by people being unable to deal with stress. “It was a disorder that most obviously affected women and so wasn’t taken as seriously,” Loder says. “And it’s a pain disorder. Pain is subjective: we don’t have any way of measuring it, which can make it very hard for people to believe it’s real. Plus, on top of all of that, it’s episodic, so between attacks, sufferers may look perfectly well.”
The fact that migraine is researched at all owes a lot to the development of the medication methysergide in 1960, which was found to eliminate headaches in weeks. The drug is no longer commercially available as it was found to have serious side-effects, but its legacy remains. What had been perceived as a psychological condition clearly had a biological basis. “The market is, of course, very big,” Loder says. “It’s a common disorder, it lasts decades. So, that made pharmaceutical companies sit up and take notice; money poured into the field; it improved and professionalised research.”
However, migraine receives much less funding, compared with similarly debilitating conditions. Studies looking at money allocated by the US National Institute of Health, for example, have shown that migraine is considerably underfunded.
OTH
Extracts:
One in seven people around the world suffer from migraine. In the UK, migraine has a crippling economic effect, with approximately 25m days lost every year, costing the country £2.3bn. But while the condition has been studied since the time of the ancient Greeks – who attempted to treat it with trepanning, by drilling a hole into the skull to release evil spirits – it remains poorly understood with few adequate treatments.
Why don’t we know more?
Serious research into migraine began only relatively recently, as for a long time many doctors believed that it was a psychosomatic condition produced by people being unable to deal with stress. “It was a disorder that most obviously affected women and so wasn’t taken as seriously,” Loder says. “And it’s a pain disorder. Pain is subjective: we don’t have any way of measuring it, which can make it very hard for people to believe it’s real. Plus, on top of all of that, it’s episodic, so between attacks, sufferers may look perfectly well.”
The fact that migraine is researched at all owes a lot to the development of the medication methysergide in 1960, which was found to eliminate headaches in weeks. The drug is no longer commercially available as it was found to have serious side-effects, but its legacy remains. What had been perceived as a psychological condition clearly had a biological basis. “The market is, of course, very big,” Loder says. “It’s a common disorder, it lasts decades. So, that made pharmaceutical companies sit up and take notice; money poured into the field; it improved and professionalised research.”
However, migraine receives much less funding, compared with similarly debilitating conditions. Studies looking at money allocated by the US National Institute of Health, for example, have shown that migraine is considerably underfunded.
OTH
