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Motion sickness with migraines

I am curious if motion sickness and migraines have any neurological links. I've been a bit insecure in my balance my entire life and prone to motion sickness. As a child the motion sickness affected me less and got worse as a teen on wards (which is also when I started to get a lot of my migraine symptoms full strength). Being in a vehicle in particular makes me extremely ill, motion from a movie (especially 3D ones), seeing things move too quickly, moving my head too fast, anything which either is moving visually or physically moving me. I can also feel dizzy or off balance from a migraine in itself, and the motion triggered dizziness often causes a migraine. The thing which confuses me is when I was on topamax for a year (the only medication so far which worked for my symptoms) my motion sickness was dramatically reduced by it. I was able to do many things including rock climbing, international travel, long drives, etc without getting ill. Now that I am off topamax, just an hour in a vehicle made me throw up 6 times and I am still recovering from it.

  1. Hi Pomegranate,

    Many people with migraine seem to have motion sickness when they were children and continue on in adulthood. There are a few small study's I found on motion sickness and migraine you may be interested in reading; http://www.neurology.org/content/65/4/E9.full#sec-5 and
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20862509.

    May I ask why you discontinued Topamax if it was helping?

    Nancy

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