Migraine pills are just caffeine, whats the deal? Did cavemen get migraines? Also caffeine pills don’t even have much caffeine, is it the stimulate aspect that helps?
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We’ve known long caffeine helps mend migraines but we’ve not been sure how.
It used to be believed that migraines expanded the blood vessles in the head and because the initial reaction of caffeine is to shrink the vessels it helped that way. The problem with that theory is that caffeine actually tails off mostly as a dilator (blood vessel expander), it only constricts (blood vessel shrinking) initially.
It is now generally believed migraines increase something called adenosine in the blood. Adenosine is a sort of signal substance. It also expands the blood vessels.
But it turns out caffeine is good at silencing some of the brain receptors that use adenosine.
So as we shifted focus on understanding migraines only in the recent few years, we’ve also gotten closer to understanding why caffeine helps.
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What u/blow_up_the_outside said is correct, and I also want to add that caffeine speeds up bodily processes. As a result, it helps your body absorb the pain relieving stuff in migraine pills (like tylenol and aspirin in excedrin) faster, which makes the migraine go away faster.
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