Addressing insomnia symptoms could help migraine sufferers

The Migraine Research Foundation awarded a $50,000 grant to University of Mississippi professor and psychologist Todd Smitherman, who proposed a study to better treat people who suffer from chronic migraines.

Smitherman said that insomnia, along with depression and anxiety, are some of the psychological problems for people who have migraines. Reducing insomnia may in turn reduce the migraines, Smitherman said.  

“Seventy-five percent or more of people who have chronic migraines have insomnia of some form or another,” Smitherman said.  “It’s not hard to understand why it would be hard to sleep if you have pain that frequently.”

Smitherman said there is a distinction between episodic migraines and chronic migraines. People with episodic migraines experience the pain fewer than 15 days a month, while people with chronic migraines have the pain 15 days a month or more.

“With chronic migraines, we’re talking about people that have migraines every other day or more,” Smitherman said.  “Think about how disabling they can be even if you have them infrequently. They’re incredibly debilitating for people who have them that often.”

Migraines are much worse than people give them credit, Smitherman said.

“It’s hard for people who don’t have them to fathom just how bad they are,” Smitherman continued.  “A lot of people who don’t know a lot about migraines think they’re just headaches and you just take a couple Advil and you’re fine, but that’s usually not the way it works.“

Smitherman said the study will involve teaching people to regulate their sleep habits and generally modify their lifestyles to combat the symptoms of insomnia, and see if that helps with the migraines. The study will last for one year, and each participant will be involved for about three months, during which time their sleeping and waking cycles will be monitored.  

“One of the cool things about this study is that in addition to monitoring the headaches, we’re also going to purchase some actigraphs, which are essentially wrist-worn devices that measure sleep and wake cycles based on the person’s movement,” Smitherman said.  “It works very similarly to a pedometer. You just slap one of these wristwatches on somebody for two weeks and they bring it back in and you’ve got all their sleep/wake data instantly.”  

Smitherman began studying the relationship between migraines and other health problems during his three years as an intern and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and found that very little research had been done in that field.

“I was doing a rotation with a psychologist who did migraine research, and even though I had never in my life experienced a migraine, I realized quite quickly that there was not a lot of research being done on psychological issues that occurred in these people,” Smitherman said.  “This was at a point in time where people were just beginning to talk about something other than depression that occurred in people who had migraines, and so I ended up doing that for three years there and have been doing it ever since I came to the University three years ago.”

Smitherman said the grant has been a work in progress for over a year and that the initial idea and legwork were funded by the College of Liberal Arts, who awarded him a small summer grant that would pay him salary money in the summer so he could work on developing the much larger grant from the Migraine Research Foundation.  

According to the MRF website, they are the only organization whose sole purpose is to raise funds for further understanding migraines and developing improved treatment options for those who suffer from migraines. The foundation gave out seven grants to researchers from around the world, and Smitherman said he was surprised to be one of the choices.

“I wasn’t certain about how well it would fare simply because I was a psychologist competing with neurologists to study a neurological condition, and there were grant proposals received from nine different countries,” Smitherman said. “So when I heard that, I didn’t think my odds were great, just based on how competitive grant funding is in general. But sure enough, the review board liked the idea.”

His ultimate goal for this study is to develop a list of validated treatment instructions that can be shared with physicians who can in turn share these with their patients, Smitherman said.

He hopes that the results of this study can be used to inform physicians working with migraine patients to address their insomnia symptoms as a method to help with migraines, Smitherman said. He also hopes this research will lead to more studies in the future.

“It’s a cool study.  I’m really excited that people are so interested in it,” Smitherman says.  “We’re trying to do a lot with $50,000.  We’re trying to make the most of that amount of money then use the results to inform some much larger studies down the road.”