Watermelon and others plant foods that trigger headache in migraine patients

ABSTRACT

Background: Food is already recognized as a trigger for migraine, but its mechanism of action has not been fully clarified. There is evidence that they act on the pathogenesis of migraine, interfering with meningeal inflammation, vasodilation and cerebral glucose metabolism.

Aim: The aim of this study was to know which plant foods are triggers for migraine and the latency time for the onset of pain.

Method: We interviewed patients with migraine and tension-type headache about plant foods that trigger headache and onset time of the headache. We studied 3,935 migraine patients and 1,163 with tension-type headache.

Results: There were headaches triggered by plant foods after 90.5 ± 7.9 minutes of ingestion in 40.3% (1,584/3,935) of migraine patients and none with tension-type headache. Headaches triggered by plant foods intake are distributed in the following order of frequency: watermelon (29.5%), passion fruit (3.73%), orange (2.01%), pineapple (1.52%), grape (0.51%), banana (0.46%), cucumber (0.43%), acerola (0.25%) and papaya (0.25%).

Conclusions: Many plant foods, especially watermelon, may trigger headache attacks in migraine patients within a few minutes.

KEYWORDS:

• Migraine
• primary headaches
• dietary
• plant foods
• watermelon

Declaration of funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of financial/other relationships

The contents of the paper and the opinions expressed within are those of the authors, and it was the decision of the authors to submit the manuscript for publication.

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Contributors

All authors contributed equally.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the Ethics in Research Involving Human Subjects Committee at the Federal University of Piauí, protocol number 3,305,167 and the National Ethics in Research System, registry number 08850918.0.0000.5214, on 6 December 2008. Data were collected from January 2009 to December 2019 and all volunteers signed the Informed Consent Form.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.