Visions of flashing lights

……searing pain, nausea, a crushing aversion to light, sound and movement. These are the torments suffered by many during a migraine. So debilitating that victims have historically been set aside as ‘other’. Cast as visionaries, but also as practitioners of dark arts..

New research from the Netherlands (Radboud University Medical Centre) has come to light. It adds a morbid new characterization to Migraine’s playlist. It may be causal with regards to Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD), the degenerative heart condition that leads to acute myocardial infarction (inflammation of the heart). Migraines cannot be dismissed as mere headaches. They are a red flashing light, a possible warning of a more serious neurological or cardiac condition.

Another SCAD study in The Netherlands Heart Journal* profiled the typical patient. It was an equally shocking discovery. Of the all-female study group (females predominate in SCAD sufferers) 52% had migraines. Migraine was the single biggest co-morbid disorder of arterial dissection. It far outstripped fibromuscular dysplasia (in second place with 29%). The detailed profiles of SCAD and migraine patients were also eerily similar. Aged between 45 and 59 years old and female. Highly educated and living with a lot of stress but little depression. This vulnerability is not well known. Therefore, it is vitally important that the 75% of migraine sufferers who are female seek early help.

At the time of the Radboud paper Oxford University was also concluding its own clinical study. It found that, contrary to received opinion, migraine attacks are easily treatable. They can be dispelled with a simple therapy. And this therapy is now available online as an audiobook, ‘Evolutionary Echo, the Story of Migraine’.

Of course, there is no actual Professor Migraine, but perhaps there should be, with over two billion sufferers worldwide. I, Anthony Bateson BEM, have studied migraine with Oxford University since 2013, at three colleges, many visiting lectures at more than a dozen others, and distance learning at as many again. Professormigraine.org acknowledges the tremendous help gained from twelve academics at Oxford, in a Clinical Study that has enabled this university to have made ground-breaking new discoveries that will revolutionize our views of this condition for the future. Oliver Sacks the definitive writer on migraine was so right when he said, ‘we medics have treated migraine with the same words and treatments for two thousand years and it has all been a waste of breath’ and Oxford has proved it.

*Spontaneous coronary artery dissections and associated predisposing factors: a narrative review

Photo – Anthony Bateson BEM aka ‘Professor Migraine’

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