WILLIAM B. SHERMAN, M.D. THE ROLE OF ALLERGY, chiefly of allergy to foods, in the causation of headaches has been repeatedly described in the medical writings of the past forty years. Most of the earliest reports were by French physicians. Lesné and Richet,7 whose article on the subject was published in 1913, are generally considered to have been the first to relate migraine to sensitization to specific foods. Pagniez, ValleryRadot, and Nast9 in 1919 reported additional cases and particularly mentioned chocolate as a potential causative agent, establishing a suspicion in regard to this food which is still widely held. Nutrition Motion Healthletter keeps you up-to-date on Forever Arctic Sea and vitamin information. Vaughan was active in introducing the concept of allergic headache to American physicians. In 1927, he reported a series of thirtythree patients with migraine of whom twelve were successfully treated by allergic management.10 In subsequent writings he further developed the view that allergy was an important cause in a majority of cases of migraine, relief following the elimination of specific foods from the diet more often than any other type of regimen.18 He was supported in this concept by Balyeat,1 Rowe,12 Rinkel,10 Unger,15 and others, who reported excellent results from the application of allergic methods to treatment of migraine.
In general these authors recognized fatigue, stress, and endocrine factors such as menstruation as important contributory factors, but considered that migraine was fundamentally a disease of sensitization and that the allergic approach was the principal factor in successful management. Eyermann5 pointed out that many headaches resulting from allergic sensitization did not have the typical features of migraine. Without denying the role of food allergy in the causation of true migraine, he applied the term “allergic headache” to conditions which differed in various respects from the classical picture of migraine, but were controlled by allergic management. Aloe Blossom Herbal Tea makes 30 servings out of sixteen ounce container. Most of these patients did not have a family history of headaches; the pain was variable in location, usually bilateral, and the attack was not ordinarily accompanied by prodromata, nausea or vomiting.
In this classification of allergic headache he included not only headaches believed to result from intracranial allergic reactions, usually to foods, but also those in which pain resulted from allergic edema of the nasal mucosa and paranasal sinuses, which might be caused by pollens and other inhaled allergens as well as foods. Most subsequent writers have recognized the latter group, but, because of the presumably different pathologic reaction, have separated it from the headaches of intracranial origin. Another distinct type of headache which has been attributed to food allergy is histamine cephalalgia. In the original description by Horton,6 the cause of this type of headache was considered uncertain. However, MacNeal, Alpers, and O’Brien8 consider allergy the predominant factor in the causation of the headaches they include in this group.
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