When you think about speed, obviously in a positive way, you think in terms of advantage. And indeed, on the front of the reaction of the nervous systemknowing how to respond promptly to a stimulus is certainly useful. But sometimes having an excessively “fast” brain can also become a problem. And this too would be feminine feature, with many other factors starting from genetics to get to hormones, to explain the clear (certainly unwanted) dominance of migraine cases in the fairer sex. Thus, of the nearly 15 million people who have had at least one migraine attack in their lifetime in Italy, 11 million are women. We need to reflect on the theme, as it proposes Wave Foundation with his document “Migraine: a gender pathologyWhich contains the ten-point Manifesto “Unite Against Migraine”.
Not just hormones
To explain the role of “Speed” of thought declined to the female there are the observations of science. Above all, research has now shed light on the different motives that can favor it triggering of crises, in terms of gender.
“Female sex hormones play a crucial role in determining the gender differences observed in migraine”, reports Piero Barbanti, President of ANIRCEF, the Italian Neurological Association for Headache Research and President of AIC Onlus, the Italian Association for the Struggle against headaches. “There is, in fact, a correlation between the cyclical hormonal changes, in particular of estrogen, and the recurrence of migraine attacks. Migraine typically appears in women after menarche, presenting during reproductive age a characteristic periodicity which correlates with hormonal fluctuations: the phases of greatest severity are in fact observed in the menstrual and ovulatory period. But the prevalence of migraine in women is not just a matter of hormones. The greater speed of the female brain in fact exposes it to greater risk of attacks. A timely diagnosis is essential to establish the correct treatments, reduce the risk of chronicity and overuse of drugs and avoid unnecessary wanderings “.
Unfortunately, in the face of this need, there are still many people who arrive late for the observation of a specialist and perhaps proceed with attempts at self-care which, in the forms of real migraine, do not solve and indeed can prove to be counterproductive. Just think of what emerges from the IRON project (part of the Italian I-GRAINE migraine register) – conducted on 866 chronic migraine patients visited at 24 Italian headache centers – which in fact documented that the interval between the onset of migraine and the first access to a headache center is about 20 years old and that 80 percent of the diagnostic tests performed in the meantime are perfectly useless.
Not only that: “The IRON study has shown that the patient with chronic migraine consults on average from 8 to 18 different specialists over the course of his life, due to migraine – continues the expert. It is therefore necessary to raise the level of preparation of doctors on the subject of migraine starting with university training, which is very lacking in this regard. But it is also necessary to expand the number of university, hospital and territorial headache centers throughout the country, while at the same time defining specific paths so that each patient meets the right medical figure for their migraine, based on its complexity “.
A condition that “weighs”
Migraine has very high human costs, since it can really affect the quality of life by locking the person in a sort of parallel world, marked by crises and the fear that they will appear. But the economic burden of the disease should not be underestimated. In Italy, according to the data collected by the study My Migraine Voice, the annual cost of losing productivity in people with 4 or more migraine days per month has been calculated to be € 7.6 billion.
Not only that: according to a study of some time ago, Gema – Gender&Migraine del 2018, carried out on a sample of 607 adult patients with at least four migraine days per month, and carried out by the Research Center on Health and Social Care Management (Cergas) and Bocconi University, the estimated annual cost per patient with migraine is equal to € 4,352, of which 25 per cent for healthcare services, 36 per cent for productivity losses, 34 per cent for informal assistance and 5 per cent for formal assistance. As if that were not enough, especially in women it is more common the “presentism” that is you go to work even if you are sick.