Migraine : Evolution of a Common Disorder

Abstract

MIGRAINE is a common, chronic, incapacitating neurovascular disorder, characterized by attacks of severe headache, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and in some patients, an aura involving neurologic symptoms. In one-third of patients the headache is preceded by transient neurological symptoms that are most frequently visual but may involve other senses and speech [migraine with aura (MA)]. Migraine is extremely prevalent [affecting 17% of females and 8% of men], very expensive ($18.5 billion Euros per year in Europe], and disabling [one of the World Health Organization's top 20 most disabling disorders]. It is consequently a public fitness hassle of exceptional effect on each the man or woman and society. Most migraine assaults begin with inside the mind, as advised through (a) the premonitory signs (e.g., issue with speech and reading, expanded emotionality, sensory hypersensitive reaction) that during many sufferers are exceptionally predictive of the attack, even though such signs arise as much as 12 h earlier than the attack, and through (b) the character of a few usual migraine triggers which includes stress, sleep deprivation, oversleeping, hunger, and extended sensory stimulation. Psychophysical and neurophysiological research have supplied clean proof that with inside the duration among assaults migraines display hypersensitive reaction to sensory stimuli and odd processing of sensory information, characterized through expanded amplitudes and decreased habituation of evoked and event-associated potentials. It is usually believed that migraine headache relies upon at the activation and sensitization of the trigeminovascular ache pathway and that cortical spreading depression (CSD) is the neurophysiological correlate of migraine aura. CSD may be precipitated in animals through focal stimulation of the cerebral cortex and includes a slowly propagating (2–6 mm min−1) wave of robust neuronal and glial depolarization; the mechanisms of initiation and propagation of CSD continue to be unclear. The mechanisms of the number one mind dysfunction(s) main to the onset of a migraine attack, to CSD susceptibility, and to episodic activation of the trigeminovascular ache pathway continue to be in large part unknown and the predominant open problem with inside the neurobiology of migraine.