Being abused as a child has a lifelong impact on people, even if they think they’ve left the abuse behind. In some cases, it may come out in personality issues and in others, physically, such as high stress levels or illness.
Migraines, one of those mysterious ailments that affect so many people, is one of the long-lasting physical effects that may result from childhood abuse. Of course, that’s not to say that if you have migraines, you were abused – absolutely not. But, researchers have found that a significant number of people who do live with migraines were somehow abused or neglected when they were children.
Child abuse and neglect are, unfortunately, still very much present in today’s society. In the United States, the U.S. Department of Health has said that in 2007, state and local child protective services investigated over three million reports of abuse or neglect. Broken down, the children were victims of:
- child neglect (59%
- emotional abuse (4%)
- sexual abuse (8%)
- physical abuse (11%)
Previous research has noted a connection between abuse and future migraines and a new study, published in the January issue of Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain has come to the same conclusions.
Researchers had 1348 patients with migraines fill out surveys that measured physical, sexual, and emotional childhood abuse, and physical and emotional neglect. The researchers also asked about physician-diagnosed history of pain conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), interstitial cystitis (IC), and arthritis.
Illnesses such as these, other than arthritis, often have no explainable origin. Researchers have been trying to find out what could be causing them, but they’ve not had much success. IBS affects a person’s life by causing pain and discomfort, and by making social situations difficult in many situations. It can cause either extreme diarrhea or constipation. Interstitial cystitis can be just as socially isolating because of the pain and discomfort of always feeling that you need to urinate. Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia can cause overwhelming fatigue and pain, and there is not much in the way of treatment for any of these disorders.
What the researchers found was that those people who had migraines and who had been abused or neglected had a higher incidence of the other pain conditions, much more so than people who had not had similar maltreatment.
In the study population, 61% had at least 1 comorbid pain condition and 58% reported experiencing childhood trauma either by abuse or neglect. The number of different maltreatment types suffered in childhood correlated with the number of comorbid pain in adulthood.
Specifically, physical abuse was associated with a higher incidence of arthritis; emotional abuse was linked to a greater occurrence of IBS, CFS, FM, and arthritis; and physical neglect connected with more reports of IBS, CFS, IC, and arthritis. In women, physical abuse and physical neglect was associated with endometriosis (EM) and uterine fibroids, emotional abuse with EM, and emotional neglect with uterine fibroids.
While findings such as this can’t help prevent the illnesses, including migraines, it can give the treating health professionals something to work with. If the patients have a background of abuse, perhaps therapy to help them deal better with the past may result in a better physical outcome.
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Post from: Blisstree