Abstract
BackgroundPhotophobia and phonophobia are the most prominent symptoms in patients with migraine without aura. Hypersensitivity to visual stimuli can lead to greater hypersensitivity to auditory stimuli, which suggests that the interaction between visual and auditory stimuli may play an important role in the pathogenesis of migraine. However, audiovisual temporal interactions in migraine have not been well studied. Therefore, our aim was to examine auditory and visual interactions in migraine.MethodsIn this study, visual, auditory, and audiovisual stimuli with different temporal intervals between the visual and auditory stimuli were randomly presented to the left or right hemispace. During this time, the participants were asked to respond promptly to target stimuli. We used cumulative distribution functions to analyze the response times as a measure of audiovisual integration.ResultsOur results showed that audiovisual integration was significantly elevated in the migraineurs compared with the normal controls (p < 0.05); however, audiovisual suppression was weaker in the migraineurs compared with the normal controls (p < 0.05).ConclusionsOur findings further objectively support the notion that migraineurs without aura are hypersensitive to external visual and auditory stimuli. Our study offers a new quantitative and objective method to evaluate hypersensitivity to audio-visual stimuli in patients with migraine.
Highlights
Photophobia and phonophobia are the most prominent symptoms in patients with migraine without aura
For the unimodal auditory stimulus, Demarquay et al [19] investigated migraineurs with a classic auditory habituation paradigm. Their results showed that the auditory orienting component (N1) was larger in migraineurs compared with normal controls, which suggests that automatic attention is increased in migraineurs. These findings suggested that attention is greater in patients with migraine compared with normal controls as a result of the hypersensitivity of migraineurs to an auditory or visual stimulus
By comparing the audiovisual integration between the patients with migraine without aura and the normal controls, we examined whether the audiovisual temporal interaction of the patients with migraine without aura would be greater and have a wider range of temporal gaps compared with the normal controls
Summary
Photophobia and phonophobia are the most prominent symptoms in patients with migraine without aura. Hypersensitivity to visual stimuli can lead to greater hypersensitivity to auditory stimuli, which suggests that the interaction between visual and auditory stimuli may play an important role in the pathogenesis of migraine. Photophobia and phonophobia are the most prominent symptoms for patients with migraine without aura [3,4]. The intensities of photophobia and phonophobia correlate positively with the intensity of headache pain [5,6]. These findings demonstrate that the intensity of one migraine symptom is associated with the intensity of other migraine symptoms. Hypersensitivity to a unimodal stimulus may not be restricted to that stimulus, but it may lead to the
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