Vanessa Cooper, MD, is an assistant professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine. This is a lightly edited excerpt from her interview on the Health & Veritas podcast, episode 189, “The Science of Headaches.” Listen to the whole interview to learn more about headaches, when to seek treatment, and how to manage them.
Q+A
Quick Question: What Is a Migraine Aura?
What is a migraine aura?
Vanessa Cooper, MD: About 20% to 25% of people that have migraines will have an aura, and the most common type of aura is the visual aura, wherein there’s a depolarization, a wave essentially, that is going across the cortex of the brain.
It’s a little similar to seizures, so in patients that only have aura, seizure medications actually have shown to be effective because of that depolarization wave that goes along the cortex. Anticonvulsive medications can kind of shut down that pathway and minimize auras in some patients.
The second most common is a sensory aura, and it’s not uncommon that patients may actually have two different types of aura at the same time. That manifests usually as a loss or a tingling. Patients will describe one half of their face becoming numb and tingling, and then sometimes it’ll spread down to their arm and then also can spread down to their leg.
Patients that have had the sensory aura, they typically will say they have the visual aura first and then, all of a sudden, they notice that their face kind of feels weird and then they notice a spreading down of that sensation, spreading down to their arms or their legs.
Health & Veritas is hosted by Yale School of Medicine’s Howard Forman, MD, MBA, professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, and Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology).
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