Migraines may carry long-term baggage
Headaches with aura linked to brain lesions and possibly strokes
By Nathan Seppa
Women with migraines accompanied by a visual disturbance called an aura are more likely to incur subtle, microscopic brain damage than are women without migraines, researchers report in the June 24 Journal of the American Medical Association.
A second study finds that women who have frequent migraines with an aura are four times as likely to have a stroke in subsequent years as are women without migraines. That finding, reported online June 24 in Neurology, bolsters previous studies linking migraines with stroke.
Auras often appear as arcs of sparkling light or blurry spots.
Although the new reports may appear frightening, they don’t reveal whether migraines are causally connected to strokes or vascular damage by any known biological mechanism, says Tobias Kurth, a neurologist and epidemiologist at INSERM, the French national health and medical research agency in Paris, and a coauthor of the report in Neurology.