IT IS becoming hard to dismiss migraines as simply very bad headaches.
Earlier this year, Nouchine Hadjikhani of Harvard Medical School found that the fibres relaying pain signals from the head to the brain were thicker in migraine sufferers than in volunteers. She has now found that they also have a thicker somatosensory cortex – the brain area that processes sensation.
Twelve migraine patients with aura, 12 without, and 12 volunteers had their brains scanned using MRI. This revealed that the part of the somatosensory cortex that processes sensations from the face and head was up to 21 per cent thicker…
