Gray matter morphometry alterations in migraine

A paper about the assessment of gray matter morphometry parameters in migraine patients, Gray Matter Structural Alterations in Chronic and Episodic Migraine: A Morphometric Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, has been published in Pain Medicine. This article has been written by Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez, Santiago Aja-Fernández and Rodrigo de Luis-García, in collaboration with the Headache Unit and the Department of Radiology of the Clinical Hospital of Valladolid.

In this study, four gray matter parameters were assessed between healthy controls patients with chronic and episodic migraine: cortical curvature, cortical thickness, surface area and gray matter volume. The values of these parameters presented statistically significant differences between both migraine groups and controls and surface area differences between chronic and episodic migraine were found in diverse regions.

The findings of this research suggest that there are widespread gray matter alterations in migraine. Furthermore, chronic migraine would be a distinct entity with respect to just a high frequency episodic migraine and the surface area would be a proper biomarker to identify it. Therefore, the results suggest that the pattern of differences between healthy controls and episodic migraine patients is qualitatively different from that occurring between episodic and chronic migraine patients.

The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnaa271