Abdominal Migraine - how much do you know? Part 2

As described in the previous article, abdominal migraines refer to recurrent attacks of abdominal pain. They are linked to migraine headaches as they often convert into these in adulthood after occurring in childhood. Also, they can be genetically inherited. According to the survey run among 800++ Migraine Buddy community users, 73% of them have already been diagnosed with abdominal migraines.

We were interested in how they felt about this little-known disease. Strikingly, 23% of them estimate that they have not been well informed about abdominal migraines by healthcare professionals and 58% of the patients feel that they have never heard about abdominal migraines.

So, how do our users develop ways to prevent or relieve abdominal migraines? Many patients report improvements by avoiding common triggers, also associated with migraine headaches: lack of sleep, anxiety, chocolate, processed food etc. As they are very few studies on abdominal migraines, there are unfortunately very few identified and efficient treatments. Similarly, migraine headaches’ causes are not precisely known.

Either way, according to healthcare professionals, the initial steps for managing abdominal migraines are obviously to avoid triggers, change one’s dietary habits, and explain and reassure the patient and his/her family. They have to be informed about the characteristic of the illness, the presence of possible triggers or relieving factors. Besides, the absence of abdominal pathology or underlying causes as certain gastrointestinal, urogenital or metabolic conditions mimicking abdominal migraine has to be verified again.

Alternative treatments can also be a solution, more, in particular, cognitive behaviour therapy. Hypnotherapy, family therapy or yoga can be helpful for children with abdominal pain. Thus, 21% of Migraine Buddy users registered that they use alternative treatments to relieve their abdominal migraines.
Prescribed medication is also an area that we tried to investigate within this survey. Triptans are an effective treatment option for patients with pediatric migraine. 36% of Migraine Buddy’s users report that triptans are a helpful way to relieve their pain. However, no studies are proofing their efficacy on abdominal migraines, similarly for NSAIDs and acetaminophens.