Menstrual Migraine – I wanted to share this video that I have on my YouTube channel and Instagram because it goes over a lot of important aspects of migraine physiology that are critical to understanding when looking at minerals, hormones, and glandular function in migraine. I have provided a transcript of the video below for those who prefer to read the content. Enjoy!
Hey, friends. Marya McCormick here. In my last video, I was talking about menstrual migraine and their relationship with iron. When women bleed, they lose iron. I wrote a blog post on iron and menstrual migraine that you can find on my blog, but I wanted to riff a little bit further and make some points here in this video that I did not make in the blog post about why I think that some women get menstrual migraine during their period, because clearly, it’s not true that simply losing blood and iron alone could lead to migraine, because many women who menstruate do not get migraine during their period, right? So why is it that some women would experience a migraine from a loss of iron and having low hormone levels during menstruation when others don’t?
All women’s hormone levels go lower during menstruation. All women lose blood during menstruation. Some women have a heavier cycle and presumably lose more iron than other women – and yet still not all women who bleed heavily get migraines. What could be some of the explanations for why there’s that discrepancy? I believe it comes down to adrenal gland health and liver health.
When we look at where hormones come from, we know that progesterone and estrogen are produced primarily by the ovaries, right? And actually, it’s the lack of progesterone that triggers menstruation. So most of the progesterone in a woman’s cycle comes from the corpus luteum. The egg is released by the ovaries, and then the corpus luteum is what generates the progesterone for the remainder of the woman’s cycle. So when that progesterone runs out from the corpus luteum, that is what triggers menstruation. So menstruation is by definition a low progesterone state. When that progesterone runs out from the corpus luteum, the only progesterone that’s going to be made by the body at that point is made by the adrenal glands.
There are many hormones that the adrenal glands produce – not just progesterone and estrogen – they produce, for example, aldosterone, which regulates electrolyte balance and sodium. So if those adrenal glands are depleted when the progesterone runs out from the corpus luteum, and the body transitions over to the adrenal glands to produce progesterone, that woman will not be able to produce sufficient progesterone to keep migraines at bay. I think I’ve mentioned in previous videos, this is important for electrolyte balance because while aldosterone helps to regulate sodium balance, it’s progesterone that regulates potassium. Low potassium is one of the major features I see in lab results in migraineurs that are consistent despite any other patterns.
Another factor in why some women would get migraine during their period and others wouldn’t is the health of their liver. We know the liver processes thyroid hormones. It helps to neutralize and release any excess estrogens. There’s a relationship between estrogen and progesterone. So too high a level of estrogen (from liver congestion) will lead to low, low levels of progesterone.
And pregnenolone, which is the grandmother hormone produced by the adrenal glands, is the grandmother of all of these hormones. So when you have chronic stress, from your work, from your obligations, from the chronic pain condition you’re dealing with, the more cortisol that’s released to counterbalance that stress, the less progesterone and the less pregnenolone you’ll have access to. So basically there’s a competition for this pregnenolone, this grandmother hormone that is used to make all of those other hormones. And if your body is having to make a lot of cortisol, it will do so at the expense of progesterone.
So it is critical with migraine to get a handle on regulating your stress response. And of course, if you’re deficient in nutrients, that will be harder to do. And if you’re full of heavy metals and toxicities, that will be harder to do. But of course, many psychological, sociological, and emotional factors also play a role in your stress response.
So when you’re in a stressed-out state, you’re in a danger state, a fight-flight state. And that can translate down to a cellular level. They call it the “cell danger response”. When your cells feel like they’re in danger because of a lot of inflammation, the receptor sites on the cells don’t work as well. So it’s not just an issue of how well your glands are producing hormones. It’s not always a glandular issue: a lot of hormonal imbalances are both a glandular issue and a cellular issue of inflammation blocking the cellular receptor sites.
So all this is to say that a woman who has compromised liver function and compromised adrenals are going to be more prone to menstrual migraines because the liver processes these hormones, as thyroid hormones, but also because the adrenal glands and the liver have an intimate communication with each other, and the adrenal gland sends messages to the liver and vice versa to help regulate physiology.
So we need to learn how to support our liver to detoxify. I go over a lot of that stuff in my Repattern Migraine Masterclass. A lot of that starts in the gut since an imbalance of gut flora will produce a lot of toxins which will overload the liver further.
And then learning how to regulate our stress response is important. I think one of my favorite tools right now is neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which is learning how to get a handle on the fact that the majority of the stress that we experience is not only triggered by our environment but by the thoughts and perceptions that we generate internally. So we’re often reacting to our thought process, which is causing us stress. So that’s at least one area where we can get some leverage with some very simple, elegant tools of NLP.
But I just wanted to share that about menstrual migraine, because I think it’s interesting that not all women’s menstrual migraines go away when they reach menopause. Some women do, and some women don’t. And if we think about that connection between iron and oxygen and how when women stop menstruating and stop losing iron, a lot of times their migraines will go away, perhaps because they have more iron to bring oxygen to their cells than they did when they were menstruating. That makes a lot of sense because otherwise, it doesn’t make sense why women’s hormones or women’s migraines would stop when they reach menopause, since their hormone levels tend to be a lot lower post-menopause, right?
So this indicates that it’s the sudden fluctuations of hormones, more than just low hormones alone that can cause migraine, mixed with the hypoxic state caused by low iron. However, some women post-menopause continue to have migraines. Not all women’s migraines go away when they stop cycling.
Again, I think this goes back to women who have weak adrenal function and compromised liver detoxification pathways and will still get migraine. They will also have more severe symptoms of hot flashes when they go into menopause as the body transitions from the ovaries as the primary source of hormones to the adrenal glands when you make that transition process. If you’re someone whose adrenal glands have been seriously depleted, that transition is going to be a lot rockier than it is for someone who does not have depleted adrenals.
I hope these explanations lend a little more insight into these questions.
