Uncertain aura definition8/11/2023 Only 19% of those with migraine experience an aura with every migraine. (1)Īn aura may not be present with every attack. Migraine with aura is experienced by around 5% of the general population. An aura may occur before or during the head pain from a migraine attack. Migraine with aura is characterized by temporary symptoms known as the ‘aura’ which typically develop prior to a migraine attack. So it’s these sort of funny visual phenomenon that people with migraine are more prone to, which makes it very interesting but also challenging in patients who have it to describe these phenomenon that are so different from our normal visual world to, for example, your ophthalmologist or your eye doctor. Or they can have their hand go in front of a target and they can almost see their hand moving across space. They can look at an object, and then they can look away and they might see the same object sitting next to them, and that’s called palinopsia. Lots of people have floaters and floaters just float in your vision, but people with migraine seem to notice those floaters a little bit more readily and can actually see them easier, especially on a blank wall or in the blue sky you can see your floaters better.Īnd then people with migraine also have funny symptoms. I’ve seen people who feel like they see little things floating around. Some people have blobs of colour that they continuously see. It can be perfect vision, but they continuously see these little visual dots. Well, people see it all the time and they can see through it. Do you remember old TV sets? They’d have that snowy pattern. It’s like little itty-bitty, tiny dots that are there, like in the old TV sets. Visual snow is a persistent visual phenomenon. Remember I said the aura was a discreet neurologic event that occurred, followed by the headache. Visual snow is very different from an aura. For example, there’s an entity that we’ve come to call visual snow. There are some people with migraine that can also get other visual phenomena. People with migraine, in general, are very visually sensitive people. Peripheral movement in the visual field will sometimes even trigger a migraine. But also visually sensitive to stripes, flickering lights, lights that are moving. And we talked about light sensitivity last year. What I think is also interesting about people with migraine with aura and with people with migraine, in general, is that in-between their big headaches, they’re also visually sensitive, so they’re always a little bit more light-sensitive than the next person. It’s still a migraine aura, but it doesn’t trigger the headache. What’s interesting about this aura is as people get older, sometimes they lose the headache but keep the aura, and sometimes that is called later-life migraine accompaniments. There are other types of auras, such as dizziness or vertigo auras, or numbness around the face and hand followed by a headache, but the visual aura is the most common. But an aura is a discreet neurologic event, usually visual. Sometimes it’s on the opposite side to the visual symptoms, sometimes it’s on both sides, and then the headache can be indiscernible from a migraine without aura. The aura frequently will come before the headache and then the person will have a headache. When they’ve done experiments looking at the brain and the slow waves that travel in the brain, the speed with which that slow wave travels corresponds a lot with the aura and scientists have figured that out. We know also, or we think we know, that it is triggered by cortical spreading depression. So we know that it’s coming from the brain. And what some people think is something is wrong with their eye, but really it’s happening in the brain, and if they cover the eye that they think has it, they can still see the little zig-zaggy lines or spots on the page in the other eye. Just almost like a little flickering or almost kaleidoscopic, and then it will build up and grow. It’s usually heralded by a visual symptom, which we call aura, and it’s a discreet neurologic event that causes disturbance in the vision.Īnd it often will start little. Okay, so one thing we have to understand is that people who have migraine with aura have a specific kind of migraine.
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