Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about migraines.

And if you want to follow along with written notes on this topic, as always, you can follow along at zero definals.com

slash migraines or in the neurology section of the Zero definals medicine book. So let's get straight into it.

Migraines are a complex neurological condition that causes a headache and other associated symptoms.

And they occur in attacks that follow a typical pattern.

There's several different types of migraine that you need to be

aware of. And there's four to remember. Migraines without aura. Migraines with aura. Silent migraine,

which is a migraine with aura, but without the headache. So just the visual changes in aura, and hemiplegic migraine.

And we'll talk about each of these four and what they mean in detail later and also what aura means.

The path of physiology of migraine has been studied for decades and there's various mechanisms

and theories that have been developed, but there's no

simple explanation for why migraines occur and it may be a combination of structural, functional,

chemical, vascular and inflammatory factors that contribute to the development of migraines.

So let's talk about the typical headache symptoms that patients get with migraines. So let's talk about the typical headache symptoms that

patients get with migraines. The headaches last between 4 and 72 hours, so it's quite a long

duration of headaches. And typical features are moderate to severe intensity, a pounding or a throbbing

nature of the pain. They're usually unilateral, but they can be

bilateral. There can be discomfort with bright lights, which is called photophobia. There can be

discomfort with loud noises, which is called phonophobia. The headache can occur with or without an aura, and we'll talk

in a second about what aura is, and there can be nausea and vomiting as well. So what's aura? Well,

aura is the term used to describe the visual changes associated with migraines. And there could be

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