About Hemiplegic Migraines

Video Transcript

"I'm Alexander Mauskop, director of the New York headache center. Hemiplegic migraine. Hemiplegic migraine is a migraine that is accompanied by weakness on one side of your body. And it's a very frightening experience. You suddenly become paralyzed on one side or the other. And you feel numb and you can not move. Fortunately it's very rare it's not a common condition. We don't see too many cases of hemiplegic migraine. There are two kinds of hemiplegic migraine. There is a very strictly inherited familial hemiplegic migraine where everyone in the family has these attacks of severe migraine with hemiplegia and there's what's called sporadic migraine, hemiplegic migraine where it happens to one person in the family and not necessarily to everyone. Hemiplegic migraine usually is benign. It does not result in strokes in most people and after a few attacks people will realize that it's not a stroke. It's still frightening and still very unpleasant but usually it's not life threatening. There are rare exceptions where people do go onto develop a stroke but that's an exception rather then a rule. And there are effective treatments. We can give medicines to prevent these attacks. Once the headache starts it's very difficult to treat it but preventive therapy are usually fairly effective. Things like many blood pressure drugs like calcium channel blockers, magnesium infusions and other treatments."