New research confirms what women with migraine headaches have told their doctors for years: migraine attacks seem to get worse in the years before and during menopause.

"In women who have migraine, headaches increase by 50 to 60 percent when they go through the perimenopause and menopausal time periods," said Dr. Vincent Martin, professor of medicine and co-director of the Headache and Facial Pain Program at the University of Cincinnati.

Martin and his colleagues surveyed just over 3,600 women, aged 35 to 65, in a mailed questionnaire that asked about their menopausal status and whether they had migraines and, if they did, how often.

Then the women in the study were about evenly divided among the three groups: premenopausal, perimenopausal and postmenopausal. It turned out that while 8 percent of the premenopausal group had frequent headaches, 12.2 percent of the perimenopausal group did along with 12 percent of the menopausal women.

At first, the results might seem puzzling, since experts know that younger women often get migraines right before and at the beginning of the menstrual cycle, so one could think that women who have fewer periods [during perimenopause] would get less migraines, yet it’s not so.

Study researcher Dr. Richard Lipton, director of the Montefiore Medical Center Headache Center and professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City, said that experts believed decreasing estrogen levels explained the headaches in both cases.

If this is true, women suffering from migraines might think about taking hormone replacement therapy to raise estrogen levels to decrease headaches. However, women and their doctors should discuss the benefits and the risks -- such as an increased risk of stroke -- with hormone use.