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Summary Regular aerobic exercise worked just as well as relaxation therapy in preventing migraine headaches.
This non-pharmacological approach may therefore be an option for the prophylactic treatment of migraine in patients who do not benefit from or do not want daily medication, wrote Dr. Emma Varkey and her colleagues from the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, University of Gothenburg, in the journal Cephalalgia.Varkey’s team randomly assigned their subjects to one of three regimens for three months: aerobic exercise on a stationary bike (40 minutes three times per week), a standard form of relaxation therapy or daily topiramate.Previous studies have shown that relaxation therapy and topiramate are both effective for migraine prevention, the investigators note in their paper.The 91 women in the trial were all from a single headache clinic in Sweden. They were between 18 and 65 years old, had neurologist-diagnosed migraine, with or without aura, and got headaches two to eight times per month.All three treatments reduced the frequency of some womens migraine attacks by as much as three quarters, although the average reduction was more modest.
