Visual cortex and cerebellum hyperactivation during negative emotion picture stimuli in migraine patients

Mengxing Wang,Jian-Ren Liu,Ge-Fei Li,Qiting Zhang,Xiaoxia Du,Jingjing Su,Ying Zhao,Jilei Zhang,Shuo Wang,Hui Zhang,Qian Yao

doi:10.1038/srep41919

Abstract

Migraines are a common and undertreated disease and often have psychiatric comorbidities; however, the abnormal mechanism of emotional processing in migraine patients has not been well clarified. This study sought to investigate the different brain functional activation to neutral, positive and negative emotional stimuli between migraine and healthy subjects. Twenty-six adults with migraines and 26 healthy adults, group-matched for sex and age, participated in this experiment. Although there were no significant differences between two groups during the viewing of positive affective pictures vs. neutral affective pictures, there were different activation patterns during the viewing of negative to neutral affective pictures in the two groups; the control group showed both increased and decreased activation patterns, while the migraine subjects showed only increased activation. Negative affective pictures elicited stronger activation than neutral affective pictures in migraineurs, which included the bilateral cerebellum anterior lobe/culmen, the bilateral lingual gyri, the bilateral precuneus and the left cuneus. Our data indicated that migraine patients were hypersensitive to negative stimuli, which might provide clues to aid in the understanding of the pathophysiology and psychiatric comorbidities of migraines.

Highlights

Determined that visual, auditory and gustatory stimuli all induced obvious increases in negative affect state scores, and all three types of stimuli evoked a negative affective state and have no significant effect on physical arousal or on trigeminal thermal sensitivity[17]
We investigated the whole brain functional responses of migraine subjects and healthy controls using positive, neutral and negative emotion picture stimuli via Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
Within-group activations for the contrast of negative pictures minus neutral pictures and for the contrast of positive pictures minus neutral pictures are shown in Fig. 1 and Table 1

Summary

Introduction

Determined that visual, auditory and gustatory stimuli all induced obvious increases in negative affect state scores, and all three types of stimuli evoked a negative affective state and have no significant effect on physical arousal or on trigeminal thermal sensitivity[17]. Previous studies have suggested that the cerebellum is involved in processing sensorimotor, affective and cognitive information[23,24,25]. There are several previous studies report that migraineurs exhibited structural abnormalities in the cerebellum[21,27,28]. These structural changes may be accompanied by functional impairment. Previous studies have reported that migraineurs were sensitive to visual stimuli; for example; migraineurs exhibited stronger activation in the visual cortex[8]. We investigated the whole brain (especially the cerebellum and visual cortex) functional responses of migraine subjects and healthy controls using positive, neutral and negative emotion picture stimuli via fMRI. We hypothesized that negative emotion stimuli could induce hyperactivation in migraineurs due to the hypersensitivity of their brains to negative stimuli

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion