Effects of migraine in cognition

Abstract

Background
Migraine is among the 3 most burdensome neurological disorders in the US in terms of absolute number of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from 1990 to 2017, behind just stroke and Alzheimer disease and other dementias. Migraine is characterized as a type of unilateral primary headache marked by a series of neurological and vascular alterations, which can occur episodically or chronically and course with intermittent attacks of intense or moderate headache. Moreover, cognitive dysfunctions are interim and disabling components of this disorder and may be related to the brain processes underlying the pathophysiology.

Objective
Examine the effects of migraine in the cognitive functions, such as language function, visuospatial function, attention, executive function and memory, of adults between 19 and 45 years old.

Method
This study consists in a narrative review of articles published in the last 5 years on MEDLINE database searched through PubMed. The articles were found using the following MESHs: Migraine and Cognition.

Results
We utilized 3 studies that approached cognitive impairment in migraine attacks and interictally. In a clinical trial, 144 pacients with chronic migraine (CM) and 44 age-matched patients with episodic migraine (EM) (a maximum of 4 headache days per month) were compared by cognitive assesments. In the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), CM patients demonstrated the most striking impairment in memory/delayed recall (65.3%), attention (46.5%), abstraction (30.6%), and language (27.1%).  (To see the complete abstract, please, check out the PDF).