126
What causes migraines? Study of ‘brain blackout’ offers clues
(www.nature.com)
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
Interesting find, apparently protein levels in spinal fluid vary pretty drastically after an aural migraine (where the pain comes after aura).
They say the aura's are a reaction to total neural activity shutdown, but I have never consciously experienced that before an aura. I would expect to have deja vu after such an event
Brain blackout is kind of a dramatic word. I'm pretty sure the article is trying to refer to cortical spreading depression.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrneurol.2013.192
This is a wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It's not the whole brain though, just a portion, and it tends to happen more often in the posterior brain than anterior. That's why visual and other sensory auras (posterior brain) auras are more common than motor/weakness auras (anterior brain). The visual aura itself is the spreading wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It happens in primary visual cortex, primarily dealing with lines and colors. Visual space is represented radially on the brain, so it can often be circular. The "fortifications" or lines on the edges some people see come from the fact that it's neurons that deal with line detection. Pain usually follows shortly after, but we aren't exactly sure how that works, and this article was posing a possible mechanism to help link these. The main bulk of the visual aura where it's grey, blurry, and indistinct is the decreased activity itself in the visual cortex. The area can get larger as the wave spreads.
Deja vu or jamais vu have been reported with migraines, though that's a very rare aura in comparison. It's all depending on what parts of the brain are involved with the cortical spreading depression for that migraine aura for that person in terms of what symptom will happen. Deja vu would be more temporal lobe. Temporal lobe is the most common localization for focal epilepsies. So deja vu as a symptom of a neurologic disease would more commonly be seen with seizures (focal seizures are sometimes called auras too, which gets confusing but are inherently different from what is happening in a migraine). But don't worry, most deja vu is nothing to worry about.
My wife doesn’t usually get visual auras but she becomes extremely tired and disoriented shortly before the pain starts. Is this caused by the same mechanism?
For fatigue, I'm not sure. Multiple things are happening that give rise to migraines. But fatigue is commonly reported by people before a migraine starts.
https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/timeline-migraine-attack/
I've never had a migraine headache, but my wife gets them like three or four times a year, usually pieces by a visual aura (and sometimes if she just goes into a dark, quiet room, she only gets the aura). She always described it as an "electric caterpillar" crawling from the side. I was glad she had told me about it in detail because several years ago I got one, and that's the only reason I knew what was happening. Mine wasn't as colorful as what she described, but otherwise the same.
Here's a short video simulating one, and it's very similar to my experience (and, apparently, hers).