Many heartburn sufferers are intimately familiar with the word "trigger." Triggers are factors that can cause regurgitation of stomach contents. (Spicy foods, smoking and obesity are just a few examples.) But less attention has been given to how reflux disease itself can trigger other health problems. When you eat, food travels from your mouth to your stomach through the esophagus. Acid reflux, commonly known as heartburn, occurs when food that you have eaten defies gravity, regurgitating back up into your esophagus. The stomach acid that comes with it can burn your throat, but it doesn't stop there. As if the painful symptoms in your throat weren't enough, one doctor has suggested that reflux can trigger certain types of migraines.
A headache expert, Dr. Egilius L.H. Spierings of Harvard Medical School (www.headachemd.com), described two patients in the September 2002 issue of the journal Cephalalgia. Both had gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and experienced frequent migraines.
One patient, a middle-aged man who had suffered from migraines since age 19, found that the headaches that occurred on the left side of his head were particularly resistant to migraine medication. The left-side headaches originated in his upper gum area, and traveled through his cheek and into his eye, a common focal point for migraines.
Acid reflux, Dr. Spierings says, made the patient's gums and teeth sensitive and sore to the touch, triggering the pain that became migraines. Increasing the patient's heartburn medication decreased the frequency of his headaches.
The other patient, an older woman with headaches and sore gums on the right side, experienced similar results.
To calm the reflux, the patients took proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), a type of medication that prevents "proton pumps" in the stomach from producing too much stomach acid. It is possible, Dr. Spierings said, that PPIs have an unknown migraine-reducing ability, but he called this possibility "remote".
It is more likely, he said, that the PPIs worked merely by treating the migraine trigger: acid reflux.
