You may be surprised by some of the household names who live — and thrive — with migraine.
Migraine is the third most common illness in the world, with about 14 percent of the global population experiencing migraine each year, so it’s no surprise that plenty of celebrities live with the disease. But only some of them have gone public about it.
Like noncelebrities with migraine, some famous people who have the condition may worry about losing work and social opportunities because of it. They may be concerned about being seen as weak, unreliable, or “difficult” if they need to take time off or ask for accommodations for this often-disabling disease. It may seem easier to keep quiet.
But other well-known athletes, actors, singers, and TV personalities have chosen to speak publicly about their diagnosis and the impact it’s had on their lives. Many do it for the benefit of everyone living with migraine — to raise awareness and understanding of this often debilitating disease.
Here are some of the stars openly living with migraine.
The gymnast Aly Raisman has had migraine attacks since her early teens, but she was diagnosed only recently, in her twenties.
For a long time, the two-time Olympian and six-time Olympic medallist didn’t know the cause of her symptoms, which include nausea, fatigue, light sensitivity, and neck pain, she told People magazine.
She even attributed one of her migraine symptoms, scalp sensitivity, to her signature hairstyle — a tight bun — which she wore while training and competing.
Once she was finally diagnosed with migraine and understood why she’d been feeling the way she did, “I felt really validated,” Raisman told The Spun by Athlon Sports. “I’ve certainly been in a lot of important situations where I had a migraine and I didn’t even recognize what it was. I was always afraid people would judge me or people would say I’m being difficult.”
Now that she knows what she’s dealing with, Raisman, who stopped competing in 2016, is focused on listening to her body and taking care of herself, including asking for help when she needs it.
She previously partnered with the pharmaceutical company AbbVie, maker of the drug Ubrelvy (ubrogepant), to raise awareness of migraine by telling her story.
The tennis powerhouse Serena Williams has dealt with migraine attacks throughout her career, but she hid the condition for years, even from her father, who was also her coach, as she told People magazine. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Williams was staying home most of the time with her husband and daughter, her symptoms began occurring almost daily, she said.
“I’ve always had migraines, but I don’t think I realized what they were until I was in my twenties. I remember being younger and having to stop training, and I would always complain to my mom that I have a headache, but I never actually connected that it was a migraine,” she said in a promotional video for Ubrelvy, the migraine medication she once represented.
“If you have knee pain, it’s something that you can see, or if you’re sick and you’re coughing, people say to stay home. It’s different with migraine. People are like, ‘You have to leave work because you have a headache? It’s not that big of a deal.’ This is a horrible situation to be in when you’re doing your job,” she says in the video, adding that she often wouldn’t mention her migraine after losing a match out of fear of seeming as if she were making excuses. As a result, she often “toughed it out” at practice and during matches, feeling that a migraine attack wasn’t a valid reason to leave the court.
Williams notes that she realizes an attack is starting when she experiences light sensitivity.
She revealed to Newsweek magazine that her migraine attacks are triggered by her menstrual cycle. For years, though, she thought the timing of her attacks was coincidental.
Former Denver Broncos running back Terrell Davis has had migraine attacks for most of his life, according to an interview he gave People magazine. In the interview, Davis recalled experiencing a migraine attack during the 1998 Super Bowl: Just before running onto the field, Davis realized he’d forgotten to take his preventive medication. He quickly swallowed the capsule, but it was too late. A migraine attack crept up and benched Davis for the second quarter of the game. Nonetheless, he did end up playing during the second half of the game — so well that he earned the most valuable player title.
Having had this attack in such a public forum, Davis realized he could use his own experience with migraine to help others with the disease. Indeed, most of the fan mail he received after the game was from people thanking him for openly talking about migraine.
Davis mentioned his migraine again during his induction speech into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, telling the audience how he put up with nausea, headache, and temporary blindness as a 9-year-old so that he could continue to play football.
According to the People interview, it took Davis years to find a migraine treatment that worked for him. He now uses a combination of preventive medication, healthy diet, and CBD to keep migraine attacks at bay. (Anecdotally, CBD may be helpful for treating nausea associated with migraine, but there’s very little research supporting this or other uses of CBD in the treatment of migraine.)
About three times as many women as men have migraine, a fact that may lead some men to be reluctant to disclose they have it, too.
“It’s one of those things men are not comfortable talking about,” Davis said onstage at the 2019 Migraine World Summit. “I see more guys talking about it now, but it’s not a lot. It wasn’t until I was retired that guys would say, ‘I went through it, too.’ I was like, ‘Why didn’t you say anything back then?’ If you have migraines, it’s okay to talk about it.”
Fans of the TV series Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Kardashians have witnessed Khloé Kardashian discuss her experience with grueling, intensely painful migraine attacks that make her sensitive to light and nauseated to the point of vomiting. She was previously a spokesperson for the migraine medication Nurtec ODT (rimegepant).
Kardashian had her first migraine attack when she was in the sixth grade, but her symptoms were often written off by family members as an exaggeration since none of her family members had experienced migraines for themselves, Kardashian told Prevention in an interview.
"I vividly remember how I felt, but mainly I remember how everyone told me that I wasn't feeling what I felt. People would always say, 'Oh, it's just a headache,” she said in the interview. “That's the stigma with migraines, that it's just a headache.”
Her migraine attacks got much worse at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she added. She was unsure if the cause for the increase in migraine days was stress or getting less physical activity, and noted that her triggers are generally unpredictable. ”I wish there was more of a pattern,” she said.
The singer, actor, and Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth experienced her first migraine attack at age 25, in the middle of a performance with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, as she described to the American Academy of Neurology’s magazine Brain & Life. The vomiting, head pain, and extreme light sensitivity and dizziness that followed scared her — she thought she was having a brain aneurysm or a stroke — and also gave her newfound empathy for her mother, who had experienced similar attacks during Chenoweth’s childhood.
Chenoweth was eventually diagnosed with vestibular migraine as well as Ménière’s disease, which causes vertigo, tinnitus, and aural fullness, or a “clogged” feeling in the ears. Her migraine is chronic, meaning it occurs on 15 or more days per month.
As Chenoweth told Brain & Life, a combination of an injectable triptan medication for acute symptoms and a calcium channel blocker to prevent attacks helped to reduce the frequency and severity of her migraines. But what really helped — and allowed her to continue her career as a performer — were Botox injections every five or six months.
Chenoweth has spoken publicly about having migraine many times over the years to offer support to others who live with the disease and let them know they’re not alone.
In 2006, the actor and director Ben Affleck had to leave the set and go to the emergency room to be treated for a severe migraine attack while he was directing his first feature film, Gone BabyGone.
Affleck hasn't stated publicly how often experiences migraine, but in an interview with CBS’s The Early Show, he attributed the attack to overwork, not enough sleep, and being tense while directing the film.
Stress is a common trigger for migraine, although many people are more likely to experience attacks once a stressful period ends, rather than during a time of acute stress.
Stress management strategies such as regular physical exercise, breathing exercises, and calming music may help lower the likelihood of a stress-related migraine attack.
Sleep deprivation and oversleeping are also commonly reported migraine triggers. It can help to go to bed and get up at about the same time each day and to practice good sleep hygiene, which includes avoiding caffeine after a certain hour of the day, creating a dark, comfortable environment in your bedroom, and having a pre-bedtime routine that helps you relax and unwind.
Like many people with migraine, the comedian, actor, and television personality Whoopi Goldberg, 69, lived with the disease for much of her life with no effective treatment.
As she told Migraine Again, the doctor who diagnosed her when she was a young woman told her he didn’t have much to offer, and the over-the-counter products she tried for years didn’t help, nor did her use of marijuana and CBD products.
Goldberg has migraine with aura, and she says she knows a migraine attack is starting when she sees what she describes as a spinning silver wind-chime-like object, in her peripheral vision. Once the attack is underway, she says, she wants nothing more than to curl up in a ball on the floor.
Things started to change for Goldberg in July 2020, when Khloé Kardashian appeared on The View, the daytime TV talk show Goldberg cohosts. Kardashian was there as a spokesperson for the acute migraine drug Nurtec ODT (rimegepant) — and she was convincing enough that Goldberg asked her own doctor if she could give it a try. Goldberg also found that Nurtec ODT stopped her migraine attack symptoms quickly, and she’s also since served as a spokesperson for the drug.
Janet Jackson’s migraine condition was revealed after she had to cancel two weeks of concerts back in 2008. Jackson began experiencing vertigo during a sound check for a show in Montreal in late September of that year, according to E! News.
She later revealed through her publicist that she’s been diagnosed with vestibular migraine, a form of migraine with symptoms that include vertigo — the sensation that you’re moving or spinning when you are actually still.
The star herself has never spoken publicly about having migraine.
Vestibular migraine attacks often don’t include a throbbing headache — the hallmark of most migraine attacks — though they can. Instead, common symptoms include sensitivity to motion and vertigo that can last anywhere from minutes to days.
The actor Marcia Cross experienced her first migraine at age 14. The Desperate Housewives star was in class in junior high and believed she was having a stroke, she said in an interview with Brain & Life.
Cross said she spent a lot of time during her adolescence lying in bed coping with the pain and sensitivity to light brought on by her migraine attacks. She was diagnosed with migraine with aura.
People who have migraine with aura often experience visual symptoms including blind spots, shimmering spots, or zigzags, as well as a tingling sensation in the face or hands, or difficulty with speech, during the aura phase of the attack, which typically precedes the headache phase. Migraine with aura is sometimes confused with stroke, since the two conditions share some symptoms.
Cross once began having symptoms on set and had to be rushed to the emergency room to be treated for migraine, she told Brain & Life. Later in her career, the actress was a spokesperson for the migraine medication Imitrex (sumatriptan).
Singer Jordin Sparks went public about her experience with migraine attacks when she became a spokesperson for the headache medication Excedrin. In a commercial for the medication, Sparks said she was “lucky” when she got her first migraine, because her mother copes with them as well and recommended the acetaminophen-aspirin-caffeine combination to her.
It’s well known that migraine runs in families, and 60 to 70 percent of people who have migraine have an immediate family member (a parent or sibling) who also has or has had the condition.
In an appearance on the TV show The Doctors in 2015, Sparks said her migraine attacks start with dull head pain that intensifies and a perception of light on the outer edge of her visual field, followed by nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. She noted that floral-scented perfumes are a migraine trigger, and that she finds relief by lying in a darkened room once the attack starts.
The Swedish former soccer player Freddie Ljungberg says that hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, is a primary trigger for his migraine attacks. He once told The Telegraph that they make him vomit, lose his vision, and cause his hands to go numb, and that he discovered not resting enough after an initial episode of migraine can cause another to occur soon after.
Ljungberg told the Seattle Times after he had to miss two games as a midfielder for the Seattle Sounders because of a particularly brutal migraine attack that he has experienced migraine since puberty. As an adult, he avoids red wine and cheese, since he believes them to be triggers, he said in the interview.
Former NBA star player and coach Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who began experiencing migraine in childhood, revealed on an episode of NPR's Bullseye With Jesse Thorn podcast that his decades-long disease was cured when he underwent surgery in his forties to correct breathing issues that occurred during sleep.
Abdul-Jabbar, who was voted the NBA’s Most Valuable Player a record-breaking six times from 1971 to 1980 — a record that still stands — spent the entirety of his college years and NBA career playing for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers while experiencing debilitating migraine attacks that at times affected his performance or caused him to miss games altogether. During the 1984 NBA Championships, he had six migraine attacks in nine days.
Despite negative attitudes about chronic illness and disability in the 1980s, Abdul-Jabbar chose to be transparent about the reason for his game-day absences, even discussing the various treatments he tried. A 1987 Los Angeles Times article even revealed that Abdul-Jabbar had turned to acupuncture, biofeedback, and guided imagery to successfully manage migraine.
