The next GP Journal Club will be discussing the BMJ paper:
Migraine and risk of cardiovascular disease in women: prospective cohort study by Kurth et al.
You can download it here.
Migraine occurs in 15% of the UK adult population and is three times more common in women. This large cohort study from the US suggests that female migraine sufferers are at increased risk of experiencing cardiovascular events. What will this mean for those of us in primary care who have responsibility for managing cardiovascular risk? Should we be advising all female migraine sufferers to take a statin, for instance?
Please read the article and consider your response to the following questions, which will form the basis of our discussion:
- Was their PPI strategy appropriate? Would the study have benefited from more patient involvement?
- Elevated cholesterol and hypertension were treated as binary variables, is this acceptable
- 15.2% of the women reported a diagnosis of migraine at baseline. Is this what you would expect if the cohort was representative?
- Does it surprise you that the effects of migraine weren’t modified by other factors such as hypertension and smoking?
- Based on this study, should we be paying more attention to assessment of migraine sufferers’ CV risk?
Hope to see you all on Twitter next Sunday at 8pm.
Lucy Pocock
Follow @drpoco
