Jul 28, 2021 21:00:00

'Experiment riding a roller coaster in VR' reveals the characteristics of the brain of a person suffering from migraine

'Migraine ', which causes paroxysmal headaches, is said to cause changes in nausea and perception depending on the situation, but the cause is unknown. Others suffer from migraines on a regular basis, while others have never had migraines. So, in order to find out what's happening in the brain when you have a migraine, an experiment was conducted to examine the brain of a person riding a roller coaster in the virtual world.

Brain Processing of a Visual Self-Motion Study in Patients With Migraine: An fMRI Study | Neurology
https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2021/07/20/WNL.0000000000012443

What Does a Virtual Roller Coaster Ride Tell Us About Migraine?
https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/PressRelease/4910

Virtual Roller Coaster Ride Reveals Key Brain Differences in People With Migraine
https://www.sciencealert.com/virtual-roller-coaster-ride-reveals-key-differences-in-migraine-sufferers

It is said that about 15% of the world's population suffers from migraine, but the cause of migraine is unknown. Many scientists are doing a lot of research to find the cause and cure for migraine attacks.

A research team led by Arne May, a neurologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, had a complete migraine headache with 20 people who had a history of migraine headaches outpatients and suffered from seizures more than four times a month. We gathered 20 people who have never been.

The research team observes the subject's brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can observe the blood flow dynamics of the brain, and gives the subject a virtual reality (VR) image of a jet coaster from a first-person perspective with audio. I let you experience it at.

As a result, there were no migraine attacks, but 13 out of 20 people with migraine experienced motion sickness. It was also found that the nausea lasted for a long time and the degree of nausea was strong. On the other hand, of the 20 people who had never had migraines, 6 felt motion sickness.

Furthermore, fMRI results confirmed that people with migraine headaches were active in five brain regions, including two in the occipital lobe involved in visual processing. According to May, nerve cell activity was also prominent in the pontine nuclei , which controls movement. 'This nerve cell activation is related to visual and auditory abnormalities in the brain. It may be. '

The research team has moved to a study that compares the changes in brain activity shown in this study with the changes in brain activity associated with migraine, and says that new treatments may be found depending on the results. increase. 'Future studies need to look at more migraine patients to see if the results can be confirmed,' May said.