It is natural to look for what happened before an attack. A diary can reveal repeated associations, but an association alone cannot tell you that one thing caused the migraine. Migraine may also have an early phase before head pain begins, which makes the order of events harder to interpret.
A sequence is not always a cause
Imagine you crave chocolate, eat it, and develop head pain later. The craving could have been an early migraine symptom rather than a trigger. The American Migraine Foundation and The Migraine Trust both describe this problem with apparent food triggers and other warning signs. Stress, poor sleep and a missed meal may also occur together, so a single tag cannot separate their effects.
Why a few attacks can mislead
If a factor appears before two of three attacks, that sounds striking. Yet you also need to know how often it occurred on days without an attack. A common event may appear before many attacks simply because it happens often. Small numbers can fluctuate sharply; give a pattern more time and note uncertainty rather than treating a percentage as a verdict.
Turn a pattern into a question
Write down the suspected factor, when it happened and whether it also happened on symptom-free days. Ask whether it might be an early symptom. If you want to make a major change to food, medication or routine, discuss the pattern with a clinician. The goal is a better conversation, not a self-diagnosis. See our guide to commonly reported factors for a starting list.
What an app can and cannot show
Migrelle ranks tags recorded with attacks after enough entries. It does not compare tagged days with symptom-free days or prove that any tag caused an attack. Daily Pulse factors can be recorded but are not part of that analysis. A product with daily tracking may offer a different view; compare the effort and evidence behind each approach in Migrelle vs N1-Headache.
