Between 77 percent and 89 percent of people who are diagnosed with migraine also deal with neck pain. Neck pain tends to be more intense in people who are living with chronic migraine. These people may also have more problems using their necks than others do. In fact, neck pain is one of the most common symptoms of migraine. Some people find that it’s one of the early symptoms they can use to predict when a migraine headache is coming.

If you live with migraine and neck pain, understanding how these conditions interact could help you and your doctor manage both more effectively. This knowledge may lead to better treatment choices and improve your overall quality of life. Neck pain can also be completely unrelated to migraine. Always speak to your doctor if you have new neck pain, especially if it is severe or if you have had a physical trauma.

How Are Migraine and Neck Pain Connected?

While a large number of people experience neck pain alongside or right before a migraine headache, the exact relationship between the two isn’t fully understood. Still, researchers have found that people who experience neck pain with their migraine symptoms often experience more frequent and severe migraine attacks — and those attacks may be harder to treat. That’s why it’s worth exploring how these two issues might be connected.

Nerves

Migraine headaches are likely caused by abnormal activity that affects nerve signals in the brain. You have 12 pairs of nerves in your head. One of these is the trigeminal nerve. This nerve meets and shares information with other nerves in an area called the spinal trigeminal nucleus.

Some researchers believe that it’s this meeting of these nerves that causes neck pain associated with migraine. They aren’t sure exactly how the nerves share information or how they pass inflammation between them, but this is a logical connection between migraine pain and neck pain. Scientists need to do more work to figure out how this functions.

Nerves may also be involved in other types of headaches. You can have these alongside migraine headaches. It may be difficult to distinguish what pain is from which headache when you’re in the middle of experiencing one.

Cervicogenic Headaches

This second type of headache is called a cervicogenic headache. These headaches happen when problems in your neck refer pain to your head. Referred pain happens when the problem is in one location in your body but you feel it somewhere else.

Some of the causes of cervicogenic headaches involve your nerves. They may cause head pain that adds to your pain from migraine headaches.

Shared Triggers

Neck pain and migraine may also share the same triggers. This means that one thing may cause both your neck to hurt and a migraine headache.

Poor posture is connected to both neck pain and migraine attacks. So is tightness in the muscles of your upper back, neck, and jaw. Certain problems with the bones, ligaments, tendons, muscles, or nerves of your neck can cause both types of pain, too.

This means that the connection between neck pain and migraine might be that they’re caused by the same underlying issue. If this is the case for you, it’s important to identify that issue. That way, you can get effective treatment for it. Once you’ve done that, you may find that you experience less pain in both areas.

How To Manage Migraine and Neck Pain Together

There are a few things you can try that may help manage both migraine and neck pain. Your doctor can guide you to the options that are best for you. Most people can find ways to reduce the pain they experience from both conditions.

Medication

There are a number of treatment options available for migraine. These include both preventive treatments and acute treatments. You take preventive migraine treatments regularly because they can help you have fewer headaches and/or cause your headaches to be less intense. You take acute treatments when you’re having a migraine attack to deal with the symptoms you’re experiencing. If you can get better control over your migraine symptoms, you may find that you have less neck pain, too.

Similarly, treating an underlying cause of neck pain may help migraine attacks. You may need different medications based on whether you’re experiencing neck-based nerve pain, muscle tension, or other issues.

Physical Therapy

Physical therapy may also help alleviate both certain causes of neck pain and migraine. You may want to find a therapist who has a background working with both conditions, so they can get you a treatment plan with that focus in mind.

Most physical therapists will do manual treatments in their office to help relieve your symptoms. They’ll also give you an exercise plan or a treatment plan that you can use at home. You’ll need to keep up with all of these for the treatment to work best. Physical therapy may work best when it’s used along with other treatments, because it doesn’t always help by itself.

Lifestyle Changes

Sometimes, you can change certain aspects of your life to relieve certain physical symptoms. This is called making lifestyle changes.

The lifestyle changes that will help both migraine and neck pain will depend on the causes of the symptoms. If your healthcare provider believes that pain from nerves that cause migraine headaches is causing your neck pain, then understanding what triggers them and avoiding your migraine triggers may help your neck pain.

If your doctor thinks your neck pain might be making your migraine attacks worse, then making lifestyle changes that help your neck may help your other symptoms. Stretching regularly and changing your posture, for instance, may help you feel better. Applying heat regularly to tight neck muscles may also help.

If you decide to use lifestyle changes to help with neck pain and migraine, make sure you’re making changes you can sustain. After all, you don’t want your headache pain or neck pain to return later because you fall back into old habits. Your doctor can help you figure out how to make these changes in a way that will last.

Talk to Your Doctor

If you’re experiencing neck pain and you’ve been diagnosed with migraine, make sure you talk to your doctor about both problems. Your doctor can help you figure out if your migraine attacks and your neck pain are connected and if there’s an underlying issue you need to deal with. This is the best way to pinpoint the treatment options that are the most likely to give you some relief.

Your doctor can also help you find treatment options that would be effective at managing both issues. This may be the same treatment or one treatment for migraine and another for neck pain. If you follow through with these treatments, you could experience some relief from both kinds of pain. Pain relief can make you feel better about yourself, your life, and your overall health, so don’t let these things go. You deserve to feel great and participate fully in the life you love.

Talk With Others Who Understand

MyMigraineTeam is the social network for people with migraine and their loved ones. On MyMigraineTeam, more than 85,000 members come together to ask questions, give advice, and share their stories with others who understand life with migraine.

Do you experience neck pain connected to migraine headaches? What works for you to help ease that pain? Share your experience in the comments below, or start a conversation by posting on your Activities page.