(HealthDay News) – High school football players appear to be twice as likely to have migraines as the average person, which may be due to head injuries and concussions the athletes endure during play, two small new studies suggest.
The first study found that one-third of a group of 74 football players from Louisville, Kentucky-area high schools reported migraine-like symptoms.
“In the general population, anybody out walking the streets in America, there’s a 16.2 percent prevalence of migraine,” said senior researcher Dr. Tad Seifert, director of Norton Healthcare’s Sports Concussion Program in Louisville and head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Headache Task Force. “We found that almost 34 percent of our players self-reported a history of migraine.”
Even that number is likely understated, said Dr. David Dodick, a concussion expert at the Mayo Clinic and chair of the American Migraine Foundation.