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Abstract
Migraine is a complex disorder of the brain whose mechanisms are only now being unraveled.
It is common, disabling and economically costly. The pain suggests an important role
of the nociceptive activation, or the perception of activation, of trigeminal cranial,
particularly intracranial afferents. Moreover, the involvement of a multi-sensory
disturbance that includes light, sound and smells, as well as nausea, suggests the
problem may involve central modulation of afferent traffic more broadly. Brain imaging
studies in migraine point to the importance of sub-cortical structures in the underlying
pathophysiology of the disorder. Migraine may thus be considered an inherited dysfunction
of sensory modulatory networks with the dominant disturbance affecting abnormal processing
of essentially normal neural traffic.