Women who have migraine with or without aura and women with a history of migraine do not have significantly different rates of cognitive decline than women with no history of migraine, according to research published in the August 8 online BMJ.
Compared with women without migraine, women with migraine did not have a greater risk of substantial cognitive decline, which was defined as the worst 10% of the distribution of decline from the first to the last cognitive assessment of the study.
To evaluate the association between migraine and cognitive decline among women, Pamela M. Rist, ScD, a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues analyzed 6,349 women who had enrolled in the Women’s Health Study. At two-year intervals, the investigators conducted as many as three cognitive tests, including the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status, immediate and delayed recall trials of the East Boston Memory Test, a delayed recall trial of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status 10-word list, and a category fluency test. The researchers combined test scores to create global cognitive scores, and tests assessing verbal memory were combined to create verbal memory scores.
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