Is the multisensory integration different between migraine patients and healthy subjects? A study of concurrent visual and somatosensory stimulation

Abstract

Merging of sensory information is an important process for all species. Both in humans and in animal models, co-application of bi-modal stimulations results in greater neural activation than the sum of each unimodal stimuli delivered independently. We have tested how the same process of multisensory integration take place in migraine patients, by evaluating the potential ability of concurrent visual and somatosensory stimulations to affect the mechanisms of habituation, an indirect hallmark of cortical responsivity.