Coffee and Migraines: Friend or Foe?

So let's start with the good news, which is that caffeine really can help a migraine.

If you look at the box of Excedrin Migraine, you'll see that it has 130 milligrams of caffeine, which is a little bit more than you'd get from a cup of coffee.

And it's there for good reason.

In 2017, a group of headache researchers pulled together all of the placebo-controlled studies they could find on caffeine added to over-the-counter pain relievers.

What they found was that adding caffeine made the pain relievers work better.

And for migraine, the dose that made the difference was 100 mg or more.

So why might it help? Part of the answer is that caffeine blocks a chemical in your brain called adenosine, and blocking adenosine seems to turn pain down.

Caffeine also helps the pain reliever get absorbed faster.

And for a mild headache that isn't ramping up fast, I've recommended a simple over-the-counter pain reliever like aspirin or ibuprofen with caffeine, as long as it's only a now and then kind of thing.

In fact, there are some for whom that is the only thing they have to do for their migraines.

Others of us with migraines aren't quite so fortunate.

But so if caffeine can help a migraine, how does it also end up on all of those trigger lists? So it turns out that there are four ways that coffee can work against you.

but you can do something about every one of them.