One Step Closer To Discovering Migraine Cause
Woot. A French team of scientists have announced something that may help clear up the mystery as to why we get migraines. A part of the brain called the hypothalamus gets very active when a person is suffering a migraine. This is leading the researchers to believe that migraines do not have one cause, but that a chain reaction has to occur, of which the hypothalamus seems to play a big role.
The Details
The study was done at France’s Ranqueil Hospital. The goal was to capture what the brain goes through when a migraine attack happens naturally, NOT induced. In order to see what the brain was up to, Positron Emission Topography (PET)was used. PET is yet another scanning machine, but you don’t have to be in that little tunnel like with other scanning machines. PET shows what areas of the brain are currently active during specific times.
They hoped to study migraines without aura, as they are the most frequent types of migraines. They got their wish. Seven migraineurs volunteered to have their heads examined. When they felt a migraine coming on, they went to the hopsital without taking any medications or therapies. Their brains would get PET scanned within three hours to get an accurrate scan.
Why not just induce a migraine? They hypothalamus does not get busy then, and the hypothalamus has long been a brain organ of interest in the cause of migraines. It had been suspected that the brain reacts differenetly when a migraine is induced than when one just comes from out of the blue. And they were right.
Hypothalamus activity was previously caught before cluster headaches (which are different from migraines). According to Professor Peter Goadsby of the institute of Nuerology at University College London:
The area [of the hypothalamus] reported as activated in migraine is about 10mm more anterior than the cluster headache area.
What Does This Mean?
It’s a tad bit difficult to cure anything if you don’t know it’s cause. Although the cause of migraines is still unknown, at least this latest study helps show how to better focus future studies. In other words, the haystack that our needle is in has just suddenly got a lot smaller.
February 7th, 2008 at 10:11 am
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