Chewing Gum Causes Headaches

It turns out that we may be able to alleviate a lot of headaches by simply abstaining from gum chewing.

This is good news, especially for teens, who commonly experience all kinds of headaches. In fact, 50 percent of kids aged 15 and older get them. Not only that, but headaches are believed to account for 10 percent of all absences from school, according to an article having to do with chronic daily headaches in teenagers, published in Pediatric Child Health.

One doctor, Dr. Nathan Watemberg of Tel Aviv University, noticed that many teenage patients at the Meir Medical Center chewed gum daily. He conducted a study on 30 of those patients to find out the effect of refraining from chewing gum. Dr. Watemberg found that 87 percent of those in the study experienced significant relief, according to a report by Tel Aviv University. Of the 30 total patients, 19 stopped getting headaches altogether.

“Twenty of the improved patients later agreed to go back to chewing gum, and all of them reported an immediate relapse of symptoms,” said Dr. Watemberg.

These are pretty strong signs. If you suffer from headaches, don’t wait to reach for the aspirin tomorrow. Spit out the gum today.

Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2912621/#__ffn_sectitle
http://www.aftau.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=19569

The information supplied in this article is not to be considered as medical advice and is for educational purposes only.