In a puzzling twist, women who have a history of migraine headaches are far less likely to develop breast cancer than other women, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
The study is the first to look at the relationship between breast cancer and migraines and its findings may point to new ways of reducing a woman's breast cancer risk, they said.
"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 Dr. Christopher Li of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, whose findings appear in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
Li said the reduction in risk was for the most common types of breast cancers -- those driven by hormones, such as estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by estrogen, and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, which is fueled by progesterone.
Hormones also play a role in migraines, a brutal type of headache often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and heightened sensitivity to light and sound. Women are two to three times more likely than men to get migraines.
While it is not exactly clear why women with a history of migraines had a lower risk for breast cancer, Li and colleagues suspect hormones are playing a role.
"Women who have higher levels of estrogen in their blood have higher levels of breast cancer," Li said in a telephone interview.
And he said migraines are often triggered by low levels of the hormone estrogen, such as when estrogen levels fall during a woman's menstrual cycle.
Women who get migraines "may have a chronically lower baseline estrogen. That difference could be what is protective against breast cancer," Li said.
Copyright Reuters
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