Weather and headaches
 

Someone recently posted about barometric pressure and weather affecting symptoms.

I live in Minnesota.

Last year, my symptoms were severe around the same time as this year Oct-Mar.

My head pressure is coming back and migraines are worse too. This week has been especially bad.

I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed a pattern like this and if anyone lives in the southern states or has moved from a worse weather state.

I do much better when I increase the humidity level. Low humidity can cause dry sinuses and sinus head aches. It can also cause dehydration and related head aches.

I made a post a while back about the pressure change affecting my head. I know exactly what you are saying about being worse in the winter. I was born and grew up in WI, and stayed there for 5 years after my accident. When I realized that it was the weather, I moved to central WA. It was much better there, but I still only did really well in the summers, with winters being unbearable.

Now I am in AZ, and just completed my best month in 7 years! On my head chart, I can see a dramatic decrease in symptoms in each of the past 3 winters that I have been in AZ. I notice an immediate relief, but it seems to take a good month for all of the symptoms to resolve and level out. San Diego should be even better, as it is even more stable. We were in San Diego this past weekend, and I was able to enjoy life with my family, instead of just trying to survive. Needless to say we are house shopping again...

Here are the barometric pressure charts for St Paul MN, Yuma, AZ and San Diego, CA for Jan 2015. It may look like the one for St Paul is exaggerated, but this is the way it looks to get it to the same scale as the others. Each little square is 0.2" Hg change, and each is a day in the other direction. For me, I will have issues if the pressure changes more than 0.2" in one day. In short, if the angle is 45 degrees or more, I have problems.

As you can see, there are no level spots in St Paul in Jan, just a few half days like on the 20th which is not enough to recover before the next wave hits. I would have had zero good days in this month.

In Yuma there were maybe 3 days that had a big enough change to cause issues (3rd, 22nd(4 tenths), 24th). I got by these with very few issues, maybe because my head had a bunch of stability in between?

The chart for San Diego shows maybe two little changes, and would likely have hardly caused a problem. Bear in mind that this is an unstable month of all of these cities, and that summer would be better yet.

I've noticed a difference with weather pressure at times. It might be the change in pressure in your sinuses triggering symptoms. . . .not sure though.

With the symptoms starting from Oct - Mar it might not be the 'winter' per say but the fact that with reduced sunlight your body isn't making as much vitamin D. Not to be a vitamin pusher but taking 4-5 IU of Vitamin D has really helped me recently. :)

Vitamin D is probably a factor, but probably not a major factor for me because my symptoms turn on and off, whereas one would expect them to gradually increase or diminish as Vitamin D levels rose and fell over the seasons.

I have done a lot of reading on this fascinating topic, and just recently came across a really neat app for my smartphone called dminder. It lets you input your specifics like age, weight, skin tone, dietary habits, etc, and then it calculates your vitamin D intake by taking into account your location, time of day, exposure, clouds, etc. I tried it out today, and even on the southern AZ border (lat 32*) one can only synthesize Vitamin D during the middle 4 hours of the day because the max angle of the sun reaches only 41* now. I went for a hike, and it says that I picked up something like 8,000 Units of the Sunshine Vitamin.

Those are really helpful graphs. Can you tell me how you get to them or find them?

Go to http://www.wunderground.com/ and look at the top menu bar. There is one called "More" that has a submenu of "Historical Weather". You can then input your city and date of interest. To see a month at a time, click on the custom tab, and input the date range of interest. You can search weather data all the way back into the 1940s. At the bottom of the page, there is a link to output a comma delimited file, that can be imported into a spreadsheet for analysis.

For what it is worth, the home page now has a 10 day forecast graph that includes a forecast of the barometric pressure change for your location.

Agree!
 

I lived in Michigan, and recently moved to IN. I AM A HUMAN WEATHERVANE NOW. :-( This is not a superpower you want. I Can usually tell by the intensity and type of headache how far off the storm is. Not good. This winter has been bad.

Since I recently moved, I'm in the process of finding a new pain mgmt dr. He wants to do Botox injections. Does anyone have any experience or story to relate?

Hang in there everyone. I'm on year 5 with this thing. I'm way more functional than I used to be, but I still have "those days". It's hard to pick yourself up sometimes, but it helped when I finally "accepted" that this may be my new normal.

I know. Not what you want to hear. But until you get better, the anger, stress, sadness, and frustration only gets in the way of the small improvements you may be unable to notice.

Love and light,
Laura

lhanlin,

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