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Migraine’s
silver lining -- drop in breast cancer risk: study
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Migraine sufferers who likely
have no kind words about the condition may take comfort
in news that women who get the extra-strength headaches
have a 30-percent lower breast cancer risk, according
to a new US study.
“We found that, overall, women who had a history
of migraines had a 30 percent lower risk of breast cancer
compared to women who did not have a history of such
headaches,” said Christopher Li, a breast-cancer
epidemiologist and associate member of the Hutchinson
Center’s Public Health Sciences Division in Seattle,
Washington.
Li was lead author on the study that appeared in the
November issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and
Prevention.
Migraine history seemed to curb risk of the most common
subtypes of breast cancer: those that are estrogen-receptor
or progesterone-receptor positive, the study found.
Those tumors have estrogen or progesterone receptors,
or both, on cell surfaces, which makes them more responsive
to hormone-blocking drugs than tumors that lack those
receptors.
While the biological mechanism behind the association
between migraines and breast cancer is not entirely
understood Li and colleagues suspect that it has to
do with hormone fluctuations.
“Migraines seem to have a hormonal component in
that they occur more frequently in women than in men,
and some of their known triggers are associated with
hormones,” Li said.
“For example, women who take oral contraceptives
‘three weeks of active pills and one week of inactive
pills to trigger menstruation’ tend to suffer more
migraines during their hormone-free week,” he said.
Conversely, pregnancy -- a high-estrogen state -- is
linked to a significant decrease in migraines.
“By the third trimester of pregnancy, 80 percent
of migraine sufferers do not have these episodes,”
he said.
Estrogen is known to stimulate the growth of hormonally
sensitive breast cancer.
According to the US National Cancer Institute, if current
rates do not change, one in eight women will develop
breast cancer over the course of her lifetime.
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