Has anyone else started looking at smartwatch data around their migraines?
Random one for the group. I bought a Garmin earlier this year for completely unrelated reasons (running, briefly, before I gave up on that). But I've been checking the watch app on the morning after a migraine, just out of curiosity, and I keep noticing the same thing. My HRV was always low the day before. Not always by a lot, but always.
I'm not a doctor or anything close to one. I'm just a person with chronic migraines staring at graphs trying to find a thread. Has anyone else here noticed something similar in their own data? HRV, sleep stages, stress score, body temperature, any of it? Or is this just me seeing patterns where there aren't any?
I've tried a couple of small things on the days my HRV looked off, going to bed earlier, skipping coffee, drinking more water. Honestly I don't know yet whether any of it helped or whether I just had a quieter week. Would love to hear what other people have done with this kind of data, if anything. Or whether I'm wasting my time.
Hi
, thanks for starting this forum. You bring up such an interesting topic and I hope some of our community members who use smart watches can share with you if they've found patterns tracking their migraine triggers/symptoms and if it's been helpful. One of our members did write about using a smartwatch to track her health, https://migraine.com/living-migraine/smart-watch-health. It sounds like she does use it for help with tracking things for her doctors and specialists, but doesn't necessarily mention tracking whether anything is specifically noticeable as far as migraine goes.
I've been doing a little googling to see if there is information on decrease in HRV and migraine, and it looks like there have been some studies about this type of thing. I'm not a scientist, so I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding everything correctly, but it does look like what you're seeing, the decrease in HRV before a migraine, is a correlation that has been noted in these studies. Here's a link a study done on this, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8021769/ and a second one, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03331024231206781. I would also be curious if your migraine specialist has any insights into what you've been noticing on your smartwatch.
I hope you can get some additional helpful feedback and information from the community here! We appreciate you bringing this up. -- Warmly, Christine (Team Member)
