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. 2012 Oct;32(13):991-7.
doi: 10.1177/0333102412453954. Epub 2012 Jul 17.

Migraine and risk of incident diabetes in women: a prospective study

Rebecca C Burch  1 , Pamela M Rist, Anke C Winter, Julie E Buring, Aruna D Pradhan, Elizabeth W Loder, Tobias Kurth
Affiliations

Migraine and risk of incident diabetes in women: a prospective study

Rebecca C Burch et al. Cephalalgia. 2012 Oct.

Abstract

Background: Previous cross-sectional studies evaluating the relationship between diabetes prevalence and migraine status have found conflicting results. We examined the relationship between migraine and incident type 2 diabetes (T2D) in a cohort of adult women.

Methods: Prospective cohort study conducted among participants in the Women's Health Study who provided information on migraine and did not have diabetes at baseline. Our four exposure groups were migraine with aura, migraine without aura, past history of migraine and no history of migraine. Cox proportional hazards models were used to determine the hazard ratio for incident T2D.

Results: Among the 38,620 women included in this study, 5062 (13.1%) women had migraine, of whom 2014 (39.8%) reported migraine with aura, and 2087 (5.4%) women had a past history of migraine. During a mean of 14.6 years of follow-up, there were 3032 cases of incident T2D. After adjustment for confounders, the hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) for developing diabetes was 1.06 (0.91-1.24) for women with migraine with aura, 1.01 (0.89-1.16) for women with migraine without aura, and 1.13 (0.98-1.30) for women with a past history of migraine compared with women with no history of migraine.

Conclusion: Results of this prospective study in women do not support an association between migraine and incident T2D.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest with regard to the specific matter of this study but list full disclosures for the past two years:

Dr. Burch is supported by a fellowship from the American Headache Society.

Dr. Rist has received funding from a training grant from the National Institute of Aging (AG00158), from the Rose Traveling Fellowship Program in Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health, and from a travel fund from the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Winter has received an international postdoctoral fellowship of the American Association of University Women and a research fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Dr. Buring has received investigator-initiated research funding and support as Principal Investigator from the US National Institutes of Health and research support for pills and/or packaging from Bayer Heath Care and the Natural Source Vitamin E Association.

Dr. Loder receives salary support from the British Medical Journal for services as a clinical editor.

Dr. Pradhan receives funding from the US National Institutes of Health and has received investigator-initiated research support from Sanofi-Aventis. She has received honoraria from Roche Diagnostics for educational lectures.

Dr. Kurth has received investigator-initiated research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the French National Research Agency (ANR, Agence Nationale pour la Recherche), Merck, the Migraine Research Foundation and the Parkinson’s Disease Research Foundation. He is a consultant to World Health Information Science Consultants, LLC and he has received honoraria from the American Academy of Neurology and Merck for educational lectures, from MAP Pharmaceutical for contributing to a scientific advisory panel, and from the British Medical Journal for editorial services.

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