Proposal of Mechanistic Hypothesis for Influence of Headache-Related Brain Activity on Muscle Activity and Its Verification

Headaches is known to be a major health issue. Primary headache has tension-type headaches, migraines, cluster headache, and others. Common acute medication is known to be a less effective at severe pain stage of the migraine. It is known a few patients can take medication at the appropriate timing, indicating that subjective pain assessment negatively impacts medication and patients’ quality of life(QoL). This study aims to improve the QoL by predicting the onset of headache through continuous biological signal measurement and providing appropriate timing of medication. This paper hypothesizes the effect of the migraine and the cluster headache on muscle activity that increases fast-twitch muscle activity, and verifies it using surface electromyography(sEMG). sEMG measurement shows that mean frequency of sEMG increases before the headache onset. It will be necessary to verify the validity of the phenomenon and develop prediction algorithms in the future.