Symptoms of Complex Migraines

Video Transcript

"I'm Alexander Mauskop. I'm Director of the New York Headache Center. Symptoms of complex migraine, or we call it complicated migraine; we usually use this term to describe neurological symptoms that occur with migraine. Some people will call these migraines basilar migraine or hemiplegic migraine or migraine with aura. That is, you have something beside the headache, besides the nausea and sensitivity to light and noise, such as difficulty speaking, confusion, double vision, unsteadiness. All these neurological symptoms some people would call complicated migraine. In fact, the official term for this condition is migraine with aura or hemiplegic migraine. Basilar migraine does not exist. Research indicates that basilar migraine is just another form of migraine with aura. So, often, complicated migraine frightens people because of these neurological symptoms suggesting a stroke or something else serious going on in a person's brain, but if this happens on a regular basis and repeatedly we know that's a benign condition. Most of the time we do do some tests such as MRI scans and blood tests. If we find nothing on the scan we just assume it's a migraine with aura or a hemiplegic migraine."