By Suzanne Rostler
NEW YORK, Jun 12 (Reuters Health) - Relaxing and concentrating on deflecting
pain may help children stave off migraine headaches, results of a preliminary
study suggest.
Using relaxation techniques such as meditation and stress control in
response to physiological cues is known as biofeedback, an alternative therapy
used to treat a range of disorders.
Now, researchers in Germany suggest that the therapy can help children
reduce the number, intensity and duration of migraine headaches and may be used
as an alternative to medications, which are not always effective in children.
"This exploratory study provided results emphasizing the potential
significance of neurofeedback in the prophylactic treatment of migraine in
childhood," said Dr. Michael Siniatchkin, the study's lead author.
Neurofeedback, he explained in an interview with Reuters Health, is a method
of self-regulating the central nervous system.
Siniatchkin and colleagues with the University of Kiel in Germany taught 10
migraine patients, aged 9 to 14 years old, relaxation techniques to reduce
muscle tension and techniques to distract themselves from pain.
The cause of migraines is still not completely clear. According to the
authors, migraines may occur when nerves in the brain's cortex become
overexcited, possibly due to a combination of genetic influences and
environmental factors such as stress, fatigue, certain foods, weather
conditions, menstruation and hormonal changes.
Over 8 weeks, the researchers monitored activity in the brain's cortex.
Children also kept a weekly headache diary in which they recorded when a
migraine occurred, how long the headache lasted, the intensity of the headache
using a scale of 1 to 10, other symptoms such as nausea and vomiting, and use of
medication.
After 6 months, symptoms had improved by as much as 55% in children who used
biofeedback compared with 8% in children who did not receive relaxation
training. Furthermore, half of the children in the biofeedback group reported at
least a 50% decrease in the number of migraine headaches they experienced,
according to the report published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.
"Training led to a significant reduction of days with migraine and other
headache parameters compared to observations made before the training and to the
clinical course of migraine in the (other children)," the authors write.
The researchers attribute their findings to both a decrease in cortical
activity and an increase in children's confidence to deal with the headaches on
their own.
"We hope that...this study will stimulate further investigation of the
clinical use of neurofeedback in prophylactic treatment of migraine,"
Siniatchkin and colleagues conclude.
