Magnetoencephalography Study Of Emotional Stimulation In Patients With Interictal Migraine

Objective:To investigate neuromagnetic brain responses to affective facial pictures in interictal migraineurs using magnetoencephalography(MEG).Methods:16 patients with chronic migraine,24 patients with episodic migraine and 37 age-and gender-matched healthy controls were recruited.Clinical and Neuropsychiatric evaluation included VAS、HAMA、HAMD、HIT-6、MIDAS.The Virtual Waveform and Gamma Oscillatory signatures of neuromagnetic activation to the fearful,happy and neutral facial pictures were studied by using Synthetic aperture magnetometry(SAM).Brain activation and propagation pathways after negative emotional stimulation were located.Results:(1)Analysis of the virtual waveform in the ranges of gamma-oscillation showed that latencies of virtual waveform induced by fear expressions were shortened in left prefrontal cortex in chronic migraineurs than that in episodic ones and control subjects.(2)In left thalamus,right cerebellum,brain stem and periaqueductal gray,the amplitudes of virtual waveforms induced by fear expressions were lower in patients with episodic and chronic migraine than that in the control.(3)For episodic migraine,the analysis of virtual waveform induced by negative emotional picture showed there were significant differences in latencies between bilateral primary somatosensory cortex,and in amplitudes between bilateral cerebellum.For chronic migraine,there were significant differences in amplitudes between bilateral primary motor cortex and anterior cingulate cortex.(4)No significant differences were discovered in initial activation site between two migraine groupvfor negative emotional stimulation.In addition,it demonstrated that recursive propagation from the frontal to the posterior cortices and vice versa were through the deep area of the brain(cortico-thalamus-cortical pathways)or the middle cortex of the brain(cortico-cortical-pathways),whatever in migraine patients or controls.Conclusions:Present study found that people with migraines had processing bias for negative emotional cognitive.Left prefrontal can capture the information of negative emotional stimuli earlier,and the excitabilities of subcortical regions to negative emotional stimuli were significantly decreased in interictal migraine,which may indicate that an imbalance among excitatory and inhibitory between headache attacks and interictal phases.