Andreas Sommer – software and health engineer – Blog

Connecting Intermittent Explosive Disorder with diet and histamine intolerance: no more uncontrollable anger and rage

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) is a disease defined by uncontrollable anger and rage, racing thoughts and other exaggerated, abnormal behavior.

Science and medical information only provides symptom descriptions for this disease, and sufferers have basically no chance to solve it. Only psychiatric medication is well-known to improve it to some extent but can have strong side effects and does not solve the cause.

IED destroys families, relationships and probably even lifes. It’s considered a rare condition, but with an estimated lifetime prevalence of 3-5%, it seems not rare at all (for comparison: ADHD is estimated at 5-10% and considered a widespread syndrome nowadays). Guess the impact that a permanent solution could have, even if it only works for a subset of affected people. I found an easily-explainable solution that worked for me ‒ mostly the dietary change of leaving out histamine-rich food items.

My story

…won’t be detailed very much here. It doesn’t matter for resolving the illness, and I want my privacy after all these years of fighting and not knowing what’s going on. The goal of this article is to help others. There are many stories online to read and watch, even scientific case reports, in case you’re unfamiliar with how the disease can present behavior-wise:

Videos about someone’s experience with IED incl. self-harm, pet harm, hitting walls and other people, strong anger outbursts. Got better with medication. Disappointments, loud noises or getting touched mentioned as main triggers. Relation to autistic traits.
Description from someone about her boyfriend and what she did to help. On the other side, most IED stories online can rather be summarized with recommendations like "leave that person". This disease easily destroys family ties if untreated.
As already mentioned in the above links, there are hints about anger symptoms relating to ADHS and autism. For instance, try searching for "anger" on r/ADHD and lots of posts will pop up.
Case reports of Mayo Clinic patients (dated 1987), mostly clinical severity
One study correlates road rage incidents, aggressive criminal acts and other actions with IED (full text not available)
Not about IED, but this r/Anger post reveals various scary stories of what people do while their brain is in anger mode

Another health topic on a software engineering blog? Yes, normally such a switch of topics is unexpected because those computer freaks only write about their stuff. Unless health problems take over your life, you develop an analysis tool specifically to figure it all out, you become a hobby scientist and expert for your own health, ultimately find real solutions, and want to share it for the benefit of everyone out there. My analysis software, yet unpublished, again had an important stake in studying this problem, and below I’ll prove once more how important data analysis and correlations are.

Development of the disease

Intermittent Explosive Disorder didn’t really occur when I was younger. A few signs here and there when I got unnerved for small things, but overall it either didn’t "break out" yet, or wasn’t noticeable. My father had anger and rage outbursts ever since I can remember, and IED is said to possibly be genetic. I didn’t want to be like him.

I got clearer symptoms only at adult age. It’s impossible to say when this really started. Some problems at work annoyed me, particularly if others did stuff without taking care, resulting in me fixing the issues, for example, and I’d sometimes rant about it. This could however be explained as the perfectionism of a young engineer, or by the environment the company gave me. I left the somewhat-toxic environment at my own choice, switched companies and was good for a long time, but still, the same triggers could annoy me. Stupid drivers on the road would also upset me. I can’t say at all when road rage started for me, but I had it to a non-extreme extent, meaning I wouldn’t honk and shout at everyone, like some other people do. It mostly stayed inside my car. And then came family life and failing partnerships, creating strong social triggers for this illness. Yet, all my anger usually had a good explanation: stupid or ignorant people around me, bad relationships, a crying baby, inconsiderate drivers, clumsily forgetting where I had put my belongings in the apartment, things falling down or just "everything goes wrong today" kind of days, having to repeat myself when talking to others, and so on. I kept telling myself that it’s those triggers which caused anger, and didn’t think much of it.

There’s an important distinction to make here: IED presents as uncontrollable anger and rage. Probably every healthy person gets angry about something many times in their life, maybe even many times per week depending on the circumstances. The difference is that someone suffering from IED goes from trigger to rage in milliseconds and doesn’t have the capability to stop the bad behavior at the onset. Specifically, in your mind, you can’t choose an alternative behavior. There’s no time for it, and no other thoughts in your head at that time. You explode, shout, rage, misbehave, and the angry feeling in your gut ‒ sometimes felt literally ‒ might only go away after a few minutes or sometimes hours. I have no clue how and when the disease developed.

Detecting IED in yourself

You came to this article, so you already know or suspect that you or someone close to you has a problem. The first important part now is to know your triggers. I’ve listed a few of mine above. Also, you will likely have non-triggers, that is, bad situations which you can tolerate without getting angry. For me, I was mostly fine at work except for a few occasions, I never had problems among my friends, and my anger was rather in family situations and on the road. Triggers can vary a lot, but I guess the disease is the same.

Second, you need to find out if you have a normal level of anger, for example triggered solely by your surroundings, or rather anger that is uncontrollable, pathological anger, stemming from a mental illness that needs to be fixed in your body and appears even for the smallest issue. It’s super easy to always blame others, especially if you’re really behaving well with other people 80% of the time. But those 80% of time don’t matter if the remaining 20% are killed by your rage outbursts. Mind that it’s very much possible that other people in your environment treat you badly, making you angry, and you still can’t just state it’s only the other person. Try to deal with, and objectively look at, yourself, as you can’t change others. If your current relationship already got intoxicated by anger and stress, there’s always the chance in another one and sometimes things need a fresh start.

There seems to be no objective way to quickly determine if you have the disease. Nevertheless, read on to what my body’s problem and the solution was… you’ll see that anyone can try my dietary solution safely and thereby find out if bad behavior and outbursts turn back to healthy levels ‒ or go to complete remission (no more symptoms), as is the case for me.

Medication and optionally therapy can be a good first step

I had no idea that a mental illness, caused by biochemical reasons in my body, could even be the case. I only got that last-resort idea after many years of struggling, facing life consequences and trying a myriad of interventions to fix this syndrome, all without any improvements. With that idea, the logical next steps to rescue myself were to call the crisis hotline, confirm the idea of getting medical treatment, getting an emergency appointment and a first prescription for an antidepressive from my general practitioner doctor, and then following up with a psychiatrist about the medication. (You can’t imagine the effort and pain it took me to get to that simple-sounding conclusion which finally got the ball rolling.)

The psychiatrist appointment, which in countries like mine usually only happens after several weeks or months on the waiting list even in case of emergency, was honestly useless because it only confirmed that the medication was a good first treatment choice and that the psychiatrist had no idea about IED whatsoever. In fact, IED only appeared in the ICD (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) around 2016, and was mainly documented in the USA before that, described for much longer in their DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and case/medication reports dating back to 1987 and maybe even earlier. Doctor can’t do much about IED apart from prescribing antidepressives and a few other, off-label medication types. Psychiatry is a field that has almost no technical or medical options for root cause analyses, but I was still surprised that not even blood was drawn or any tests made when I was there. The medication I got from my general practitioner, chosen by guidelines, was quetiapine (Americans know it from the brand name Seroquel), a drug affecting neurotransmitters in the brain. My dosage was 2x25 mg a day, the minimal therapeutic dose. Another well-known type of medications that "work" for IED, according to online stories and case report, are SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). The beta blocker propranolol is also documented to help in many cases.

My point here is: medication has been available for decades, why not try it? For me, trying the pills for a while proved that 1) they do work pretty quickly and 2) it’s in my body and not a psychological problem. That’s why all the talk therapy and other attempts failed in the long run. Therapy has a short-term positive effect that feels like starting with a new mindset, and therefore I’d recommend trying it in combination. It’s not for me though. Since the medication worked to a very good extent, and symptoms reappeared when trying to lower the dose or not taking a pill for a day, I knew that it might be possible to find the actual cause in my body. I think medication is a good start to quickly get rid of IED-triggered behavior. It may even work long-term if you don’t experience intolerable side effects. However, mind that those medications can have serious side effects and don’t treat a cause. Particularly medications affecting neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine are well-described if you search online.

I had researched SSRIs before and was actually hoping to get one of them to try, as they are said to be highly effective within weeks, albeit sometimes with harsh side effects. It turned out that quetiapine was a similar drug I hadn’t read about before, and it worked within days, not weeks. Not only my irritability improved a lot, but also my motivation, insomnia and how good my days felt. Racing thoughts were completely gone. I was finally able to freely decide what my mind thinks. It felt like seeing snow for the first time in life. My thoughts were totally calm. If I did get a small intrusive thought, I could now just decide to stop thinking about that topic! This was suddenly the case in all life situations. In addition, and much more important, things wouldn’t annoy me so easily anymore, and if they did, I could decide within a few seconds whether I react to it and get annoyed. Previously, I had milliseconds and the reaction was like pre-programmed, not decideable. That was the "uncontrollable anger" part of IED ‒ also gone, thanks to medication.

Eventually though, I was able to get rid of the medication after about 4 months. At that time, I had not only, luckily, found the real cause, but also experienced severe and dangerous side effects. There had been a few rough and somewhat-acceptable, known effects such as sedation (which subsided quickly after experimenting with intake timing), insomnia, and exacerbated restless legs syndrome (RLS; I normally have this in summer) due to the influence on dopamine. But those last weeks before quitting, I couldn’t sleep at all anymore, was groggy and very dizzy all day, was ready to pause my gym membership because I couldn’t sustain any sports or much movement anymore, and eventually considered visiting a hospital. Particularly my lower body was physically tired in a way that I’ve never sensed before. I’d like to sensitize you about such risks. Almost every medication with strong main effect can also have strong side effects. Every doctor knows that, normally. I’m especially considerate of anything that crosses the blood-brain barrier. These issues went away after tapering off the medication ‒ which by the way should never be done at once ("cold turkey") because of the corresponding risks.

Measuring symptoms to find the cause

In autumn 2024, I finally picked up the term "Intermittent Explosive Disorder" again for my research even though I remembered that other than some symptom descriptions, there was nothing interesting to find online when I heard of the term first around 2022. This led me to finally write down symptoms in a structured way, long-term, every day. It’s not easy to find a metric that can be objectively measured and consequently written down each day without guessing (was my anger a 7 or a 9 out of 10??). The same applies to other symptoms, though, and fortunately I had years of experience writing down health symptoms from my migraine research (I fixed migraine to a good extent, see my article).

The first metric I started to write down daily is "inner anger" on a scale of 0-3 where 1 would be annoyed feeling, 2 stronger anger, and 3 a freakout, even if it remained only in my head.

And the second one is "nice to person XYZ" on a scale of 1-5, with both the day’s minimum (worst behavior) and maximum (best behavior) written down, so actually two metrics. I did it for multiple close people, so I had even more data. On that scale, 1 stands for screaming, wild, unfair, outrageous behavior, 2 for very unfriendly, 3 for neutral/affirmative, 4 for friendly/nice and 5 for loving/caring/understanding behavior.

Together, this means I have one internal metric that was "measurable" even if I didn’t shout or otherwise react to other people, and two metrics that define my externalizing behavior, or in other words, how bad IED actually affected my behavior towards others, not just my thoughts. It was so incredibly stupid to start the data collection so late, as I knew that the data is the most important input for finding correlations with other conditions.

What could I now do by just having some numbers of how angry and outrageous I was? Standalone, those numbers are useless. They must be correlated with, at best, possible causes. I had lots of conditions already written down for a while due to my migraine research. For example whether I was outside in the sun, did sports, took supplements and ‒ sadly only since that autumn ‒ also what I ate on each day. After a few months, I still had no clue and also didn’t find any success stories online. I tested and analyzed supplements which are supposed to help (e.g. magnesium is said to be calming), among other attempts. I spare you the details.

Histamine intolerance (HIT) is the cause, omitting histamine-rich food items the solution

I had used magnesium for years to try and combat migraine. It’s recommended for a myriad of health conditions and said to have a calming effect, improve sleep and headache, yada yada. It’s the holy grail supplement nowadays. Different magnesium salts have different effects and side effects, but for me, magnesium had exactly one outcome:

Magnesium vs. anger (since writing down data, until roughly the time I figured out this negative effect, ~100 days of data)

Remember my scale of being nice and friendly to "person XYZ"? It’s the main behavioral problem I wanted to improve and magnesium supplementation lowered my niceness score by 0.8 points! That’s vastly significant. (For simplicity, I combined all magnesium types and dosages into one bar in the graph since there was no difference for me.) For the "inner anger" metric, worsening can be seen as well, but it’s not very obvious, so I’m happy to have chosen an externalizing behavior metric as well. The more often I took magnesium, the longer the very bad effect lasted.

This was the first hint of effects from diet and supplements. I also tried the ketogenic diet which is effective for the more well-known mental health disorders (depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc.). In short: it didn’t help for my IED (and I might have done it wrong by miscalculating the fat ratio). After starting to write down total daily fat, protein, carbohydrates and calories to help get used to keto, I extended that at some point to write down the foods I ate. For example, my spreadsheet has one row for each meal (breakfast 1/2/3, lunch 1/2/3, dinner 1/2/3) and I’d put the cooking ingredients in there, such as "pizza with flour, tomato sauce, champignons, salami, grated gouda cheese".

After several months of recording food items, I found the first food which strongly affected my anger: my beloved peanuts. Then other nuts. Actually, almost all nuts (not all are displayed below). Shit.

Without/with certain types of nuts vs. anger (74 days of data)

The bars for "I ate cashews/almonds" are shown transparent because they have less than 10 days of data each, but the effect is clear: these and even more types of nuts turned out as very bad triggers for my anger. Statistically, one of course has to exclude cofactors like combinations with other foods. I did that. The data didn’t lie. Ripping those favorite snacks out of my diet already helped tremendously.

I still wasn’t sure what the common denominator was, though. That turned out to be high histamine content. My "bad list" of foods grew to over 10 items after a few more weeks of research. It was all easy after getting the initial idea and the written-down data available for every day. It’s just statistical analysis and in the years before, I had already written the tool which produces the above graphs from my spreadsheet of health data (the tool will be released in a few weeks or months, I hope).

As of June 2025, my known incompatible foods were:

avocado
banana
blueberries
chocolate
coconut milk
coffee (incl. decaf)
cream
eggs
green salad
joghurt
kiwi
nuts (most probably all of them, but some I eat so rarely that I don’t have enough data; for example brazil nuts which are anyway to be eaten in very small amounts)
onions
spinache
tea (from the actual tea plant i.e. black/green/white tea, not herbal/fruity water)
vinegar and fermented foods (sauerkraut diarrhea, ewwww never again)

There are very few stories on the internet saying that histamine can have an effect on your mental state and behavior, but there are. And here’s mine. The data proves it. I created a metric in my statistical analysis which tracks how many of those known-incompatible foods I ate on a day, and in retrospective, the number of portions perfectly, linearly (!) correlate with anger symptoms:

Incompatible foods vs. anger

It can’t be more obvious than those graphs: all anger metrics are worse the more high-histamine foods I eat. It’s not gluten, not lactose, not some minor, usually destroyed-by-cooking toxin like oxalates ‒ it’s histamine! Histamine is in many foods, can’t be destroyed or dissolved by cooking and there are great lists available online that show which foods can have a high content.

Mind that not everyone has the same trigger foods. Tomatoes are listed on all web pages that discuss histamine intolerance, but for me, they’re actually very positive. Maybe that’s just a gift so I have at least one favorite food left that I can eat? Meat is good for me as well, luckily, because otherwise I wouldn’t know anymore what to eat to get satiated.

The above data had already convinced me, but there were more signs that hinted at histamine being the actual problem:

Since magnesium was extremely bad for me, which I still can’t understand today, I tried its antagonist calcium. And indeed, calcium is linearly positive regarding anger symptoms! Calcium even seems to work independently from leaving out my trigger foods. I guess that it’s because calcium is a potent antihistamine. It was used as such in the early 20th century. The effect was very easy to observe: if I have a stuffed nose and take calcium, the nose is mostly free within 20 minutes, and the effect could last up to 3 hours. Surely there might also be a risk to high calcium supplementation, so I rather consider diet the main solution for IED, and will be very considerate about using calcium at all.
The more incompatible foods I ate, the more my nose is stuffed. This relationship is also perfectly linear in my data. So the surrounding topic to research here is allergies. Not just food allergies, but also pollen and other triggers. I currently believe that heat is also a trigger. Start reading about "histamine intolerance" (HIT), "mast cell activation syndrome" (MCAS) and related topics, and you’ll get into a huge world of people with extreme health trouble, with various suggested solutions.

So in summary, leaving out food items and taking calcium did the trick. I’m still in full remission, no anger symptoms, after several months on this restrictive diet.

If you ask now: what if the medication has fixed the problem in the long term, and not the dietary change? No, the data and my observations were absolutely clear here. Going lower than the minimal dosage of quetiapine brought back anger symptoms latest after 36 hours. Its effect only lasts while the level remains roughly constant, which is why you need to take two pills each day. While the medication reduced symptoms to a good extent, leaving out foods had a much stronger impact, namely complete remission of symptoms. I don’t consider the medication a solution, or find it in any way comparable to the exclusion diet.

Also, I use the antihistamine cetirizine every now and then against my pollen allergy on days with a runny nose. That didn’t have an effect on the anger symptoms. It’s not surprising: antihistamine medications block certain histamine receptors, and usually not all of them; they don’t influence accumulation of histamine.

This is the end of the informative part of the article. Below you’ll find another optional section with my next steps to try and find the root cause for my body’s overreaction to, or overaccumulation of, histamine. I don’t want to miss out on great foods and drinks forever. No facts or findings in there, yet, but maybe there will be an update later. Good luck to you!

What comes after the anger is solved?

How to ensure the symptoms don’t come back? I don’t really believe in histamine intolerance as standalone problem or it being the root cause. I reckon it’s caused by something else. And I don’t want to skip eating all those great food items forever. I don’t have a clear answer yet, but the research about HIT led to SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) as a possible cause. Since SIBO is quite widespread, the possibility for me to have it seemed high, so I did a test. SIBO is a common underlying problem of IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), but I don’t have any digestive or abdominal problems, or frequent flatulence from certain foods. Why do a test then if I don’t have the typical symptoms? Well, let’s compare that to my histamine intolerance: it’s absolutely rare to get mental symptoms from too much histamine. Most people simply get allergy symptoms like skin rashes, runny nose, itchy eyes and so on. I had regular allergy symptoms as well since I’m allergic to trees and grasses. This still doesn’t mean you can’t have other symptoms. Just because something is rare and almost completely undocumented doesn’t mean it cannot happen. I’m ready to do anything to fix my health issues long term. It’s like in software engineering: if you do it the right way, the problem doesn’t come back to you later. This explains why I wanted to test for SIBO despite not having the well-known symptoms like bloating, diarrhea and digestive issues.

The test cost around 100€ incl. return shipment of the glass vials, and debrief phone call about the results. Since doctors and insurances here don’t know or cover SIBO, I paid and did all this myself. There are several labs offering tests, even in other countries. The results turned out strongly positive for hydrogen gas production. In the article The Surprising Connection Between Histamine Intolerance and SIBO, among other sources, I found a reasonable explanation: overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine, where naturally only a small amount of bacteria should arrive and settle, can damage the gut lining. And that in turn can lead to bad degradation of histamine by the body. There are enzymes involved in the degradation process, as you’ll read in the first 5 minutes about histamine intolerance, yet supplementing the DAO enzyme didn’t help in my case. Anyway, due to this finding, my current attempt is to fix SIBO and thereby maybe the root cause of histamine intolerance. The problem is that I don’t have anger symptoms anymore, so it’s impossible to relate the gut healing with improving symptoms. Yet I still have insomnia as very major health issue, and if my craziest theories prove to be true, then histamine keeps me from falling sleep at night, treating SIBO will fix HIT, and I’ll be happy in life 🤔. Wish me luck, since this isn’t much based on data or other people’s experiences anymore.

I’m following the recommended antimicrobial treatment: oregano oil, berberine, then probiotics, and finally gut restoration with certain supplements. I’ll update this article if it improves anything. Again: I can’t tell if anger symptoms improve since I’m in full remission already. Plus I want to reintroduce avocado, chocolate, eggs, among other items, and not fear food any longer. The exclusion diet is said to be required only temporarily for histamine intolerance, and not required long-term for everyone.

How I mostly fixed my migraine, weather and sports-induced headaches

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After 37 years of migraine, I found a scientifically well-explained solution. It’s hydration with just table salt as electrolyte. And a few additional habits to turn off the remaining headache that the salt couldn’t always prevent.

In this article, I want to explain the background, and since it’s a supplementary intervention without much research behind it, my data about safety and long-term efficacy after trying several variants of salt supplementation.

My last blog post was 3 years ago, as I was spending lots of private time solving health issues. This is still a software engineering blog, and software helped me figure this all out.

Migraine started in childhood

It all started with the early signs of developing a "migraine brain": many nights of my childhood, I had to wake up several times to vomit. Combined with a terrible headache, of course. In adolescent years, I would often come home from school, just wanting to lie down in a dark room until the headache pain, light sensitivity and sometimes sound sensitivity ended the next morning. Surely, I missed out on lots of fun in my childhood. I don’t remember when the puking part ended, but the rest never did… until I found the solution which drastically helped within a matter of weeks.

Doctors couldn’t do or understand much about migraine back then. At the age of 18 or so, I still had no remedy at all. I remember a general doctor telling me: "Strange, aspirine should work after 30 minutes". Of course, aspirine can be effective in some common headache types like tension headache, but barely for migraine headaches. Why would nobody ever tell me? I still tried that medication all the time to no avail. The term "medication overuse headache" only became well-known later. At that age, I already had some theories what’s triggering the illness for me, such as weather and air pressure changes, but my pure observations wouldn’t help because I couldn’t change the weather.

My main symptoms are a headache developing over several hours, then in case of very strong migraine also a neck strain spreading usually on one side of my head. Once developed, I wouldn’t get rid of it until waking up the next morning. Luckily, I have never experienced cluster headaches or migraine lasting several days. A visual aura happened only once, and scared me. Migraine can have many prodromes (early sign of migraine onset), symptoms with and without pain, and is therefore studied as multifaceted, allegedly hard-to-fix sickness.

For a while in my youth, I subjectively believed that drinking coke works against headaches. Even in later years, I tried a few caffeinated and other drinks in this faith. My parents and me never collected any data. It could have proven that the sugary drink didn’t help at all. I was too young and naive to get this idea, and no doctor recommended a headache journal either. All I got was two dead teeth and several root canal surgeries from all those drinks. They were available because my parents bought them all the time. Moms and dads, stop this crap!

Science principles ‒ why even write about this single-person case?

Doctors had no idea of migraines back then. My parents also had the average health knowledge for that era: none. And who’s to blame them ‒ the 1990’s were still a time in which you had no other chance but to trust experts: doctors and unfortunately also newspaper and magazine articles. The internet, open science and wide-spread, free health information by governments or even influencers all happened much later. And despite the existence of these great sources of information, many people, not just our parents' generation, still don’t make use of them. So as I solved my migraine by a convincing extent, I also set out to tell others about the story, and clearly document my case on this public, free website. I believe that free information is a cornerstone of modern science. There are too many commercial interests and corruption conflicting with science and its subsidization. The solution is to simply override scientific malpractice by single people’s experience-based, anecdotal, and in my case data-backed, solutions. That’s my personal rationale behind this article and also behind the things I’ll write about next: free information gives people the power to fix their health.

Obviously, my solution may not work for everyone else. But you’ll read below that salt supplementation wasn’t my own idea. A whole Facebook group is dedicated to a related protocol and has helped an unknown number of people. There are forums and groups for many illnesses, which is a great way to discuss your specific symptoms. These groups are usually structured by questions and comment threads and, only if you’re lucky, clear instructions on what to try against the respective illness. They are however not an easily, publicly accessible and searchable way to find information about migraines. I’m therefore trying to put together the major parts in a concise way, even if I only have data and proofs for my single case.

Failed attempts

French fries: not a healthy, permanent solution

By the age of 25, I hadn’t tried much apart from aspirine and triptans, in the hopes that some unproven "blood pressure in the brain vessels" theory plays out somehow. No medication really worked, and regularly buying a pack of 2 (stupid package size!) triptan pills at a horrendous price therefore wasn’t justified. Instead, I toughened up, so-to-say, not letting migraine days ruin my activities. They of course still did, because you can’t fully focus on work or hobbies, nor do sports with a full-blown migraine. The acceptance however worked somehow on the psychological level to weaken its position as a miserable part of my life.

In 2021, four years ago, me now aged 34, I somehow got the idea of writing down daily symptoms in a spreadsheet, as an attempt to get the headache and other symptoms solved. Not long after, my mouth ulcers were gone after trying out several interventions (hint: use SLS-free toothpaste). So I considered data as a great way to correlate symptoms, interventions and with that, potentially solve health issues. I continued, switched from paper spreadsheets to a huge Google spreadsheet, tried out more and more supplements and stuff in order to solve my main concern at the time ‒ the migraine headache and accompanying neck pain.

My strongest migraine attacks would usually come with strong neck pain, slowly spreading into my head. Many migraineurs have prodromes as first symptoms, and the headache appearing as last, most severe symptom. Prodromes let you predict that you get a headache, so the typical advice "know your triggers" should be extended to "know your triggers and prodromes". The nausea and light sensitivity from my youth are also well-known prodromes. "Feeling" weather changes is another one. I’d know in most cases if a strong headache develops over the next hours, but simply didn’t know how to prevent it.

Example spreadsheet with health data (simplified, contrived)

Before having tried any interventions, when I started to write down how strong my headache was each day, I had a headache (of any severity) every third day, 120 out of 365 days! Life sucks, eh? Many of those were also full-blown migraine attacks. The way I wrote them down in my log was easy: 0=no headache, 1=weak headache, 2=medium and already quite painful, 3=ruining my day. With this data, analyzing the monthly/yearly count of headaches, and their average severity, was the next logical step. As a software developer, I wrote my own small program to analyze my spreadsheet data. That gave answers about whether I have more or less headache if I drink apple juice, take supplements, do sports, had alcohol, etc.

I also got enthusiastic about reading scientific studies around the topic. Which remedies exist? What supplements and dietary interventions could I try? I became focused on trying vitamin D, magnesium, eating enough food because skipping meals is a trigger for me, etc. And indeed, the year 2022 turned out to have 22 headache days less than the year before. Or in words: from every third day to roughly every fourth day! Quite a success, I thought, not yet knowing that long-term health issues can be solved much better.

In 2023, I tried many more supplements from scientific literature and ideas from the internet. For migraine, you quickly find a plethora of things to try. Apart from r/migraine’s top recommendation of salty McDonald’s fries, you’ll find quite some substantiated evidence in favor of several supplements, for instance coenzyme Q10, vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin D or magnesium. And of course modern medication such as triptans or monoclonal antibody medications like Erenumab. Food triggers are also listed for a small percentage of migraineurs, but I hadn’t considered that at the time. Of those data-backed suggestions from science, and countless comments from other people on Reddit, I picked the ones which made sense to me. Since either or both of Vitamin D and magnesium seemed to help, I was eager to find other supplementary or lifestyle interventions to help my pain. Regular sports was one of the things I kept evaluating. I did neck stretches, neck strengthening with weight training, avoiding the valsalva maneuver (breath-holding) during training, different magnesium supplements and higher dosage, caffeine and electrolyte drinks, other supplements. My improvements from the previous year remained, likely because I was still using vitamin D and magnesium, but boy did this take a vengeance… higher doses of vitamin D (2000-5000 IU/day), taken over a long time, left me with permanent, severe dizziness over several months, useless neurologist appointments, their new distracting theories of "vestibular migraine", and so on. By looking into my spreadsheet, I could luckily see that I had raised the dosage before this occurred, and fully tapered off vitamin D to get rid of the dizziness. The body buffers vitamin D, so even after taking a small daily dose, I kept seeing symptoms. If you check online information, vitamin D is hyped as the world savior and high doses often mentioned as safe. That’s simply not true for everyone! This definitely made me trust N>1 science (studies on many subjects) less in the future, now equally taking single case studies and experience reports ("N=1 science") more into account. Reddit in particular turned out as great source for real people reporting about their health problems and solutions. Unfortunately, the average internet user doesn’t really detail their story at all, and health still remains individual. Anyway, internet answers can be great hints of possible illness causes that you didn’t consider before.

My research on migraine-related neck pain also misled me: my neck training sessions turned out as potential trigger of migraine, mostly since I was lifting heavy weights (up to 15 kg / 33 lbs). DOMS in the neck is a one-of-a-kind experience that not everybody gets in their life, and it surely made me stronger, but it didn’t make the headache much better in the long run, and definitely worse on training days. Another wasted effort to follow this idea, as so many before. The below section on the scientific theory will explain why migraine doesn’t originate in the neck. I consider neck pain as secondary symptom or prodrome of my migraine.

But I insisted to follow the obvious observations: intense sports were still triggering my headache. A common term for this is exercise-induced headache and it can have various causes. After a lower back injury in the gym end of 2023, I reconsidered how I do my training. I wasn’t really following common advice, even though it was known to me. I was weak in my back, but luckily smart enough to use the safety bars. Therefore, I didn’t destroy my life but was able to recover the muscle which just shut off during squats. Upon resuming strength training, I now always warm up for 5 minutes on the treadmill. I switched to exercises on safer machines and did Andy Galpin’s "3 by 5" protocol (as advertised by Andrew Huberman), meaning 3-5 repetitions, sets, minutes of break, etc. On top, I started with real progressive overload training, increasing the weight whenever I was ready to do more than 5 reps of the previous weight. Writing down the weights in a spreadsheet was again a good solution. A digital spreadsheet makes it easy to change exercises, hide the ones currently not in my plan, and so on. Google Spreadsheet comes with a good mobile app, so that’s my preferred tool. With the warmup, breaks and safety changes, the average headache severity reduced even more. Hard to quantify how much, since just a few months later, beginning of 2024, I had finally found the best-yet fix ‒ the salt intervention. Overall, in 2023, I was down to 83 headache days, i.e. one every 4.4 days.

An electrolyte product I tried

Electrolytes were an often mentioned topic on the internet and in some studies about exercise-induced headache, so I researched it further. I tried apple juice soda and other rather natural sources which didn’t help, and later sports mixtures containing sodium, potassium and sometimes magnesium. Unfortunately, here comes a crux of analyzing preventative drugs or supplements: if you only take them when there’s a trigger (for me: sports) or you feel a prodrome (for me: noticing a weather change), you can’t really find out if it helps unless there’s a super-significant difference. Interventions must be tried in a preventative fashion over the course of at least some weeks. Headache frequency without electrolytes after sports was 20.1% in 2023, but with electrolytes it was worse at 36.8%. This proves nothing. In order to look at long-term effects, I also looked at "with/without supplement on at least X out of the last Y days". And indeed, if I took electrolytes after sports on 3 out of the last 7 days (this also means sports 3x a week), the risk of a headache (20.8% in 2023) would even be slightly less compared to not taking them (23.1%). Fine, those results wouldn’t make anyone jump and say that electrolytes are any effective. Such a small difference just isn’t significant.
However, I was lucky to also have analyzed only the highest headache severity separately ‒ and of those debilitating days, I had zero when taking electrolytes after sports in 3 out of the last 7 days. Getting rid of the worst days of my daily life was a big finding, end of 2022. This was the first time when I had a clear hint about electrolytes being involved. The finding was in a small time frame and only on sports days, though. It yet didn’t prevent migraine overall.

Regarding weather-induced headaches: the triggering weather pattern never became clear to me until I analyzed air pressure information of my location. What if it was air pressure change? That would turn out as true in my data: days with pressure increase had somewhat higher risk of headache. But it doesn’t matter, as attacks could happen on days with sunshine turning to rain, rain turning to sunshine, air pressure changing in any direction. Only the probability is different, but every day is a potential migraine day! I stopped writing down the useless weather information at some point. We can’t change the weather.

Those years of reading scientific papers, social media reports of real people trying interventions took a lot of my private time. It became a full-blown hobby. The average severity (my daily headache score between 0 and 3) went down from 0.57 in the year 2021, to only 0.38 in 2023. Significant, but not life-saving. However, I wouldn’t know how to do it differently. Doing nothing would have changed nothing at all. Was it all a failure? I don’t think so. Learning about a hundred failed attempts that don’t work taught me a lot about scientific methods, real-world statistics, making logical conclusions, following the obvious instead of miniscule and pseudoscientific hints, and that apple juice isn’t really a working electrolyte even if I had the feeling that it works. Subjective feelings all turned out as false or even negative, so writing down and objectively evaluating and graphing my statistics was a good course of action. As of 2023, my homegrown analysis app had to analyze many symptoms against many conditions and produced a huge table of correlation percentages that I starred at for hours to see significant effects of supplements and other attempts. This made no sense anymore. Each analysis took 10 minutes already as the program was poorly developed and slow, not meant for long-term usage. I set out to rewrite it in another programming language, add a web page to control what I want to analyze, and to visually show graphs for correlations of symptoms vs. interventions. I’m going to publish that application in the next months, and believe it’s a quite good biohacking and health optimization tool for people who are happy entering daily data into a spreadsheet.

Despite the failure to fix headache in those previous years, I consider these years a success. They turned me into a hobby scientist dedicated to my own health, and I became interested to use this for the good of other people, too, resulting in this blog article, for instance. The fix for migraine came in 2024, and later, in 2025, I would even be able to put a decades-long mental disease into remission with the help of health data collected in my ever-growing spreadsheet. But that’s for a later blog post, if I ever dare to share that story.

The solution for my migraine: salt at the right amount

The results in the years 2021-2024:

The graph doesn’t show the severity of the headache days, only the count. You can see the dip from 83 headache days in 2023 to only 32 headache days in 2024, the year in which I started supplementing salt. That’s only one headache every 11.4 days! The average severity, not shown here, reduced from 0.38 to 0.15 (as mentioned above, I wrote down severity as score between 0 and 3 where 0=no headache, 1=weak headache, 2=medium and already quite painful, 3=ruining my day). In 2024, I only had 7 days of full-blown migraine. Numbers, numbers… they are critical to health science, but don’t nicely translate to what they mean for my life. The successful change in 2024 allowed me to finally consider migraine fixed to an extent that doesn’t make me fear it anymore. I am so happy and thankful for that.

I can only imagine what this could mean for people who have a really strong migraine problem. I have almost never experienced multi-day migraine. Mine mostly resolved overnight, but some folks even have episodes lasting weeks! Whether this solution works for you or not, I think it’s well worth the little effort to try it for a few weeks.

As mentioned, the main change is to drink a tiny amount of salt each day. If the scientific explanation holds true, there’s a good chance that certain types of migraine may have a root cause related to sodium-potassium imbalance in nerve cells and therefore supplementing with a safe dose of table salt could work for many people. There are unfortunately many types of headache in the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD) for which I cannot provide any insights. There’s however enough information on the internet to distinguish the vastly different "regular" tension headache from migraines, so I don’t explain that here. This article is about migraines, and headache as their most typical and most painful symptom. I’m not a doctor and not giving medical advice here, so treat and try all information at your own risk. Below, you’ll find a section about safety, for good reasons.

Science provides many theories and even more recommendations for migraine, with some of them making obvious sense (such as weather changes and exercise inducing headache), but no clear "cause X? use remedy Y!" findings, or explanations why there are so many different triggers. Most people with migraines are left with barely working medicine such as painkillers, aspirine, triptans or supplements (e.g. magnesium, CoQ10). With those, they get a few percent of improvement in headache days, as I experienced in my own story above, but no life-changing outcomes. And most importantly, those treatments aren’t preventative, but curative and often applied only on pain days, usually too late after the root cause has already developed in the body. Funnily, if you do statistics like me, you may get surprising results such as headache being worse on days when you took ‒ for example ‒ aspirine. That’s easily explained: you don’t take aspirine as preventative measure (I hope you don’t; ever heard of medication overuse headaches??!), but only when you feel pain already. So statistically, headache severity will very likely be higher on those days, making the statistic totally useless because the data can’t answer if aspirine worked for you. You need to try a preventative, at best cause-treating intervention over a longer period of time, and can probably ditch medication at some point.

This is the intervention that works for me now, long-term:

Drink around least 2.5 liters (85 oz) of plain water every day. I live in a country with clean, unchlorinated tap water, so I’m using that. See below for my data about headache vs. water intake ‒ I highly recommend finding your own optimum amount! On sports days, my body automatically demands more. I mostly don’t drink tea or coffee. I have an insufficient amount of data hinting that tea (black/green/white i.e. from tea plant, not herb/fruit tea) might be very positive for my headache, but such diuretic drinks make me pee very often, and both tea and coffee contain histamine which isn’t for me. Hence I’m skipping them for non-migraine reasons.
I add less than a quarter tea spoon of table salt (¼ tea spoon ≈ 1.25 g NaCl alias sodium chloride ≈ 0.5 g sodium) to every 1-liter bottle that I drink. After some days, it doesn’t taste salty at all anymore. I found that the body buffers sodium, so the absolute amount over several days is more important than weighing the exact mass.
Watch out for concerning symptoms, see the section "Safety of the salt intervention" below!

That’s why I reduced from ¼ tea spoon to basically just a pinch of salt per liter:

Less than a quarter table spoon suffices for me

At first, it took some weeks to notice much fewer days with headache or headache onset. I started the intervention in January 2024 and still got 7 headache days in that month. In March and April, I was down to only 2 headache days each month. Incredible! Since the effect doesn’t come from one day to another, it doesn’t feel like a miracle cure but I only realized after some weeks that something was strongly improved in my life. This wasn’t the end of the story though, so please read on about the safety research I did. And if you’re still interested by then, there’s a section at the end explaining what the theory behind this solution is, and how a large group of people may already have known, and benefited from this for over 10 years. It felt bad for me that the knowledge was out there on the internet all the time, me having no clue about it. My migraine could have been solved many years ago.

A common recommendation is to drink lots of water together with electrolytes, but my own data says that drinking too much is bad for my headaches:

Headache severity (0-3) vs. water intake in milliliters (data from 2024-06-01 to 2025-05-27; insufficient data for the [3500,4000) ml bucket)

For the probability of feeling any migraine prodrome on a day, the results are similar:

Prodrome probability (0 or 1) vs. water intake in milliliters (data from 2024-06-01 to 2025-05-27; insufficient data for the [3500,4000) ml bucket)

For me, 2000-2500 ml of water might be optimal, with more water making it worse. I can only guess that dilution could be the problem. Important: I only analyzed the same-day water intake. For example, if I analyze headache vs. yesterday’s water intake, the results are similar, but less pronounced. Also, I only consider salted water here and not which other electrolytes I did or didn’t take with it, such as magnesium. Significant linear-looking relationships in my data however often turned out as meaningful, so I go with roughly 2500 ml as my optimal amount, with more on sports days.

Intense sports or a full-day in a sauna and thermal spa can still evoke rather strong headaches for me. I haven’t figured this out fully and can’t claim a great remedy just yet. I’m wondering if electrolyte imbalance could explain those triggers as well.

Here are some additional recommendations:

Hydration means water + electrolytes. Electrolytes include sodium, potassium, magnesium and possibly other micronutrients if you’re deficient. It’s important to hydrate the day before sports or another intense event, and then also during that day. Pee color and times-on-toilet are said to be good hints about over-hydrated vs. under-hydrated status, but I didn’t research if that’s true. Sugar-free electrolyte supplements might work as well, but don’t overdo potassium supplementation since getting that from food is safer than drinking it all at once (article about potassium toxicity).
Warm up before sports. My data doesn’t show much benefit of warmup regarding migraine risk, but it reduces injury risk for sure. It’s a no-brainer. Overall, my gym sessions are now long, structured, and with breaks, rather than intense 30-minute workouts that make me totally tired for the rest of the day.
I take breaks during sports, so that my heart rate doesn’t go over a certain threshold (for me: 170 🤷). This idea isn’t data-backed; I only have a subjective clue that this could raise migraine risk on that day. I have a pretty high heart rate overall, typically at least 160 for any speed of running and also with other cardio sports. The more volume (~ repetitions multiplied by weight), the higher the heart rate spikes will be. I’m avoiding that by taking breaks, especially for compound/leg exercises, since those seem to require the most energy and therefore strongest heart pumping.
Another trigger: skipping a meal. If intermittent fasting isn’t good for you, leave it.
In a sauna/thermal spa, there are often very warm temperatures. Some indoor pools offer "warm water days". Both warm air and water can quickly raise your body temperature, while the body tries to stay in a small range of feel-good temperatures. So cool down outside or in the ice bath more often. Don’t hop from sauna to sauna, and don’t remain in the warm water or warm air without a cooldown break.
Make typical modern health improvements: ditch alcohol and carb-loaded drinks (also alcohol-free beer), eat fresh, little-processed and rather low-carb food. Alcohol screws up sleep and muscle growth. In my experience, the headache from alcohol hangover seems to be a different type from migraine, and should be avoided in addition. I noticed that certain, highly-processed foods gave me a headache within minutes. That only happened rarely to me, but the trigger was obvious.

I haven’t written down food macros for long enough, but my current data shows that I should probably avoid a high-carb diet:

Headache severity (0-3) vs. eaten carbohydrate amount on a day (data from 61 days of food data, year 2025, scores 0-3)

In fact, the Stanton Migraine Protocol which I’ll mention in the next sections, recommends low-carb nutrition. I tried going low-carb/keto and it’s definitely helpful to feel satiated for longer and not having to cook all the time. I’d recommend it independently of my migraine research and data.
If you feel a headache coming up despite salt supplementation, there’s still the chance to stop its progression. Put the aforementioned amount of salt on a table spoon, place it under your tongue and let it dissolve. The strong salty taste is a special experience you shouldn’t miss. I’m joking. If you’re not too late, this can still make a difference on the same day. For me, it can sometimes still fight the onset, but it adds to the absolute amount of ingested salt, so safety is a concern.
Sunstroke can lead to a similar, unstoppable headache as with migraine, but this one is actually dangerous. It’s often also associated with nausea, similar to alcohol hangover. The solution is simple: avoid long exposure of the head to strong sunlight. A baseball cap can be enough on certain days. Shadow is best. And mind that air temperature and sunlight intensity aren’t much related. You can easily get a sunburn or sunstroke in winter, just like solar panels can create lots of electrical energy despite freezing temperatures. Estimate sunlight energy, not temperature.

That’s it ‒ some changes are simple, especially the salt part, and some take more effort and knowledge, like the dietary part. Mind that the intervention does not cure your migraine illness; it only prevents it, sorry!

Safety of the salt intervention

The so-called Stanton Migraine Protocol, one of the sources recommending salt ingestion in water as migraine remedy, prescribes a larger amount of salt. I initially salted each glass of water as suggested. At some point though, dizziness symptoms started. With my previous dizziness phase caused by vitamin D (see my story above), I was already aware that the attempted interventions could be the likely culprit. And indeed, it turned out as too much salt which triggered the dizziness! (I’m not taking vitamin D anymore, so that was ruled out.)

Eating more potassium, or supplementing with a 2:1 sodium-potassium salt mix instead of table salt, didn’t change that.

Regarding the safety of sodium salt in general: too much and too little sodium both correlate with higher mortality. The WHO recommends reducing salt intake from the statistical average to less than 5 g/day salt (= 2 g elementary sodium). With processed foods, it’s easy to get over that threshold, with fresh foods not at all. You’ll need to judge your individual intake and read food labels.

Since experiencing dizziness, I tried a few variations of salt dosing. For a while, I turned back to not salting my water while still drinking 2.5 to 3 liters of water a day and keeping other things roughly the same as well. I tried without salt supplementation several times, as a crossover experiment, and it seems that my body has roughly a 10-day buffer. After that, my headaches come back, but dizziness subsides. These repeated, identical results also prove that the salt really works as preventative intervention. I didn’t want dangerous side effects like dizziness, so I reckoned that taking much less salt, or every second day, might do it as well. So what works for me right now, as written above, is to dissolve only a pinch of salt per liter, several times a day. Less than a quarter tea spoon of table salt.

I’ll keep testing this. In contrast, I’m not writing down and analyzing dietary salt intake, but that’s an option, too. Overall, my recommendation is to not treat the salt intervention as a perfect, final solution, and to observe whether it works for you without side effects.

By the way, very intense gym sessions still give me temporary dizziness, independent from salt intake. It’s a complex symptom.

Scientific theory of electrolyte imbalance behind migraine

When I found electrolytes as possibly related to my headache, I didn’t know much about brain neurology yet. That changed quickly. Angela Stanton, with her neuroscience background, pioneered both in creating a reasonable scientific theory and in bringing awareness to people about what works. Being a decades-long migraine sufferer herself, she’s much more believable than strange healing stories on the internet. Creating a Facebook group for healing migraine, in which, as of 2025-05, around 19000 people have joined, takes dedication.

That said, I particularly like the neurons' electrolyte imbalance theory as described in her book and articles. Here, I’m summarizing a few resources:

Definition of Migraine
- Migraine is genetic, and a "migraine brain" is different than a healthy one. Problems with sodium/electrolyte homeostasis (balance) leads to different electrical properties, and that is critical for nerve cells (neurons).
- Restricting carbohydrate consumption can improve electrolyte balance
- Hydration isn’t drinking lots of water
- Other possible triggers, e.g. weather changes, menstrual cycles, etc.
- Recommendations for salt intervention during air pressure increase/decrease
Specifically formulated ketogenic, low carbohydrate, and carnivore diets can prevent migraine: a perspective

Front. Nutr., 30 April 2024, Sec. Nutrition, Psychology and Brain Health, Volume 11 - 2024, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1367570

An overview paper for her theory and what’s behind it. The abstract greatly summarizes it and I have nothing to add to this great article.

This article presents a hypothesis explaining the cause of migraines, suggesting that electrolyte imbalance, specifically a lack of sufficient sodium in the extracellular space of sensory neurons, leads to failed action potentials. The author argues that migraines are triggered when sodium channels fail to initiate action potentials, preventing communication between neurons. The article discusses the evolutionary perspective of the migraine brain, stating that migraineurs have a hypersensitive brain with more sensory neuronal connections, making them more reactive to environmental stimuli and in need of more minerals for the increased sensory neuronal communication. Since glucose is often used to reduce serum hypernatremia, it follows that a high carbohydrate diet reduces sodium availability for use in the brain, causing an electrolyte imbalance. Low carbohydrate diets, such as ketogenic, low carb-high fat (LCHF), and carnivore (all animal products), can be beneficial for migraineurs by reducing/eliminating carbohydrate intake, thereby increasing sodium availability. In support, many research papers and some anecdotal evidences are referred to. The article concludes by proposing lifestyle modifications, such as dietary changes and sodium intake management. These will provide migraineurs with a long-term healthy metabolic foundation helping them to maintain strong nutritional adherence and with that aiding continued proper neuronal functioning and migraine free life.
The book "Fighting The Migraine Epidemic: A Complete Guide: How To Treat & Prevent Migraines Without Medicine" was the first thing I’ve read. It’s much longer than the above resources, but worth a read for migraineurs or relatives, such as parents trying to help their kids, as the book is written for everyone (not just scientists). If you want to check out the complete protocol, the go-to places would be the book and the Facebook group.

Hint: I’m not advertising. Science should be as open, free and without financial interests as possible. It’s just fair and important to mention my sources of information. If there’s a sold book along a plethora of freely available resources from one scientist, that’s totally fine. I could offer my endless writeup of other resources from the last years. I must have read thousands of web pages and full-text studies. This article is already too long to list and explain everything. Therefore I refer to sources that give explanations in a single place, and which influenced me the most.

The sodium-potassium homeostasis explanation makes sense to me. But I can’t tell if it’s the correct explanation. And it doesn’t matter. The result ‒ getting rid of migraine pain ‒ is more important, as long as the intervention is safe to use. That said, I’m not ruling out other explanations. Just like I’m not excluding that I might have multiple causes for headache and other symptoms.

The end of the fight after 37 years of pain

The whole endeavor was worth the effort. I became a hobby scientist, fixed more health issues afterwards, and invest even more effort into free and open science now: I’ll publish my free data analysis program soon. I learned that some of my observation-derived ideas turned out to be true: I had my own theory that electrolytes were involved, and that’s the case. Those observations should be followed first rather than trying hundreds of likely unrelated ideas from the internet or from studies that average out effects on a large population. Most importantly, my life improved a lot by solving migraine. And even though it’s not cured, and also not 100% fixed, the pain I have remaining is definitely something I can live with. And I’m happy being able to help others now by sharing my story, solution and specific instructions, fully backed by my own efficacy and safety data.

With the problem now solved closer to the cause, rather than only treating symptoms, certain triggers are fully gone: Flights usually gave me nausea and headache; even before a flight, I would already have a bad feeling in my body. Also high-speed train rides used to give me a high headache risk, likely due to the fast and countless changes of air pressure and weather along the route. With the salt intervention, these are no longer a trigger.

The result is incredible. According to the recommended treatment goals, I’m under "optimal control" with 1-2 monthly moderate-to-severe headaches (mid of 2025, much over a year into the intervention).

From: Sacco S, Ashina M, Diener H-C, et al. Setting higher standards for migraine prevention: A position statement of the International Headache Society. Cephalalgia. 2025;45(2). doi:10.1177/03331024251320608, published by Sage here. Figure 2. Aspirational goals of migraine prevention according to the position statement of the International Headache Society.

Thank you for reading, and best of luck to all sufferers!

My research on migraine will continue. I’ll probably try again to sustain a strict low-carb diet for a longer time. This article will definitely be updated once I have new insights.