While issues with the cellular powerhouses-- the mitochondria-- are often at the root cause of migraine headaches, sussing this out would require a $439 functional medicine test (blood + urine; see our Top Tests page) that can actually tell you how your mitochondria are working (yes, it's HS biology review time)-- and what might be getting in the way (e.g., excess fluoride, arsenic, aluminum, lead, antimony, mercury or insufficient B1, B2, B3, iron, magnesium, manganese, glutathione).
Listen to or read Dr. Robert Krulwich on NPR from way back in 2001: "Lord, Save Me From the Krebs Cycle" (link)
If you're not ready to dive into a NutrEval* quite yet (although it is highly likely to change your life-- not to mention set you up for the longest healthspan (as opposed to lifespan; see Mayo Clinic link on difference) imaginable), seasoned pros report resolution or dramatic improvement in 40-50% of migraine sufferers from just these 3 hacks:
Eliminate gluten & dairy
Take 500 (to 600) mg magnesium citrate daily (in divided doses, not 500 all at once! the citrate form of magnesium is what's called "hygroscopic" and can have a laxative effect)
Take 10 mg of the "P5P" version of vitamin B6
I am partial to Metagenics' (100 mg per tablet) because they are slow-to-dissolve capsules, but that's just me. (They also contain 20 mg of calcium per tablet, which may or may not be desirable for you. In general, it's unadvisable to take more than 120 mg of supplemental calcium at all-- and certainly not all at once! It just gets deposited (and not in a helpful way) in your arteries. pericardial sac, and other tissues. Pssss: please help spread the word.)
If you're a powder person, Designs For Health (300 mg per scoop) or Pure (250 mg per scoop) might be your ticket.
It can be difficult to find B6 in this low of a dose. Source Naturals, of all brands, offers 17 mg lozenges that should be able to be broken into halves. (link to Source Naturals product on Amazon) You can try higher doses, but some people are hypersensitive to vitamin B6; it makes them jittery. So just keep that in mind.
*NutrEval measures blood levels of lead, arsenic, mercury and cadmium but does not measure antimony or fluoride. For an expanded list of metals testing, both Quicksilver Scientific (blood) and ZRT Laboratory (urine) would be additional options. They are also listed on our Top Tests page (bottom left hand corner: "Blood Metals Panel"). It gives functional sufficiency & need for nearly all of the B vitamins, as well as a measures of blood glutathione, urinary pyroglutamic acid (see Rupa Health entry for this here), blood selenium, and functional need for/sufficiency of vitamin C.
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