Migraine and cortical spreading depression

Migraine is an episodic headache disorder accompanied by various neurological, gastrointestinal and autonomic changes. In one fifth of the migraineurs, a neurological disturbance (visual, sensory or motor) appears during or before the development of the headache called migraine aura. Cortical spreading depression (CSD) is a transient neuronal depolarization that spreads across unilateral hemisphere from a focus and is followed by a long-lasting depression of neuronal activity. CSD was proposed to be the underlying phenomenon of the migraine aura as it propagates at a similar velocity with visual scotomata and the transient cortical oligemia seen in migraineurs during the aura phase. This data, enabling a better understanding of migraine pathophysiology, will result in new insights into the treatment of other neurological disorders such as cerebrovascular disorders, transient global amnesia, traumatic brain injury, in whose pathophysiology CSD is supposed to take part, beside the treatment of migraine itself.