Other meanings of Migraine
Neurology
Migraine is a neurological disorder resulting in recurrent moderate–severe headaches, often accompanied by nausea and sensitivity to light or sound. Attacks can last hours to several days and may occur with or without aura, a temporary disturbance of vision, sensation, or language.1
Migraine is a recurrent brain disorder whose defining symptom is a moderate or severe headache with characteristic associated features.2 Pain is often throbbing, worsens with routine physical activity, and affects one side of the head, although it may be bilateral. Nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light, sound, or odors commonly accompany the pain.
An attack may develop through several stages, but not every person experiences all of them. A prodrome can bring fatigue, yawning, food cravings, mood change, or neck discomfort hours before pain. Aura consists of fully reversible neurological symptoms, most often slowly spreading visual phenomena, followed by headache in some attacks. Postdrome may leave exhaustion, impaired concentration, or altered mood after the pain subsides.1
Diagnosis is clinical and depends on the history, timing, symptoms, and exclusion of more dangerous causes rather than on a single laboratory or imaging test.2 Migraine without aura is the common presentation; migraine with aura includes recurring, reversible visual, sensory, speech, or other neurological symptoms that typically develop gradually and last minutes rather than appearing abruptly.
Clinicians distinguish episodic migraine from chronic migraine by headache frequency. Chronic migraine is diagnosed when headache occurs on at least 15 days per month for more than three months, with migraine features on at least eight of those days.2 A new, sudden, unusually severe headache, or headache with fever, confusion, weakness, seizure, head injury, or a new neurological deficit requires urgent assessment because it may signal another disorder.
Migraine arises from an interaction of inherited susceptibility and altered sensory processing in the nervous system, with the trigeminovascular system and neuropeptide signaling contributing to pain.4 Triggers vary widely and can include hormonal fluctuation, sleep disruption, skipped meals, stress or its release, alcohol, sensory stimulation, and weather changes; a reported association is not always a true cause.
Treatment combines acute and preventive strategies. Acute medicines include analgesics, triptans, and newer migraine-specific drugs such as gepants; anti-nausea medicines may be added. Prevention may involve beta blockers, topiramate, selected antidepressants, onabotulinumtoxinA for chronic migraine, or monoclonal antibodies targeting calcitonin gene-related peptide pathways.3 Regular sleep, meals, hydration, exercise, and a headache diary can support care, while frequent acute-medication use can itself contribute to medication-overuse headache.
Migraine can occur without headache, and its neurological symptoms may be the dominant feature in some attacks.1 Vestibular migraine, for example, is characterized by recurrent episodes of vertigo or motion sensitivity in people with a migraine history or migraine features, even when head pain is absent or mild. Other recognized variants include retinal migraine and rare motor-aura syndromes, which require careful differentiation from eye disease or stroke.
Migraine is also a major cause of disability worldwide, particularly among working-age adults, and its burden includes missed education, employment, family activities, and sleep. Women are affected more often than men, partly because attacks may be linked to falling estrogen levels around menstruation. Overuse of combination analgesics, opioids, or triptans can transform otherwise episodic symptoms into near-daily headache, making medication review an important part of management.5
A sudden or unusually severe headache, or headache accompanied by neurological deficits, fever, confusion, seizure, or head injury, warrants urgent medical evaluation.
Help improve the encyclopedia. Reports go straight to the site manager.