If you plan to direct a movie with a realistic visual migraine aura, tell your people to call my people and we'll do lunch.

If you are Edmund Messina, or any other a practicing neurologist and filmmaker call me directly: +493143028948.  (More)

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Yes, he or she can. Of course one can. Thomas Jefferson could. Can Michele Bachmann become the president of the United States of America? This, to me, is a different question.

You know, this is a science blog, and although I mostly blog about migraine, I would rather ask whether somebody who is in favour of creationism can run for president? I don't mind the country. Any country. A leader believing in creationism and intelligent design, as a replacement of a solid scientific view, is one huge step backwards.    

I just read "Michele Bachmann's Stance on Evolution Demolished by High School Student" (which I can recommend) and I read about Bachmann in both her German and English Wikipedia page, funny enough, only the former, the German page, mentions that she is a fan of creationism and intelligent design. 

Well, let's get back to migraine. Migraine varies quite a bit. Symptoms can be very severe and thus migraine can be a highly disabling disease, while in others, symptoms can be rather mild and it may even not need to be treated with medication.

The discussion, that sufaces now, is actually far too sensitve to be used in a political race. The discussion about how we educate our children, by contrast, is worth the trouble.

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A migraine attack is usually divided into four distinct phases, plus the symptom-free interval between attacks. How do these phases go together? Searching for treatment beyond "motherhood and apple-pie" advice.

+++ UPDATE with two figures I'll present at the IHC2011 +++

While some of us are waiting for the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting, I look forward to The 15th Congress of the International Headache Society (IHC2011) in Berlin. The IHC2011 takes place in the week before the Lindau meeting, from June 22-26. Maybe I'll meet a future Nobel Laureate there, the one who has found "the holy grail of migraine treatment", as  Peter Goadsby, a migraine expert, recently called it.

Just last week, the 53rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Headache Society ended in Washington. This is an intense migraine meeting month, though I must admit, I skipped the US meeting. June is also National Migraine Awareness Month in the US.

Such meetings are also always the time of heightened and unfortunately also often confusing—to say the least—press coverage. This time,  (More)

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Short movies are a great addition to posts in a science blog. I found a surprisingly easy-to-use tool for making text-based movies.

Guess what? I have not heart from YouTube as to why my video was disabled. So I'm working on a new video, but that will take a while. In the meantime, I've found xtranormal. You type something; xtranormal turns it into a movie. It is great fun.

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The members of ArtOfficial, a jazz/hip-hop fusion group from Miami Florida, turn out to be experts in neuroscience! Apply directly to yo’ primary visual cortex—Please bang (and watch) responsibly!

Two days ago, YouTube disabled my migraine video. It might be due to a copyright violation, because I used Google's homepage to illustrate the progression of a typical visual field defect in migraine. But I guess more likely is that YouTube feared that watching my video might trigger a migraine attack.

Well I do research in this direction and cooperate with other scientists that have also studied this problem [1-3]. It's true, visual stimuli are common triggers of migraine. In my video, however, I deliberately used a low contrast such that triggering a migraine attack is very unlikely. In addition, I placed a clear warning at the beginning of the video.

I think, my video did a great job in raising awareness and educating people, therefore, I asked yesterday for help on Twitter to get back my video online. Thereby, I stumbled over this tweet.

Well, 10 000 views in two weeks is not too bad. I checked out the video and was first shocked but meanwhile ...  (More)

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... which will expire on release of my migraine video. Or does YouTube really think that my migraine video can cause migraines?

Yesterday, I got this email.

Really, had I received a Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months or is this SPAM? I looked for my video and, well it's not SPAM, I saw this.  (More)

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A rare document of an acute speech problem (aphasia) during a migraine attack could recently be seen on air. A still hardly known migraine symptom that deserves more attention—and definitely no need to call an exorcist.

About a week ago, I read in the New York Times the headline "Did a Reporter Have a Stroke on TV?". I—as more than a million others—became a video witness to what happened to Serene Brandson.

In the article, I read about the first suspicion, which turned out to be wrong.  (More)

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The other review of  Siri Hustvedt's "The Shaking Woman".

I wanted to read this book as soon as it came out. Well, it was first published in Germany (i.e. in German language). I decided to wait. When it then arrived, it got lost in the piles of unread or half-finished books that are all over my place.

Almost a year later, somebody at my university told me my migraine website is mentioned in the book. Not really a surprise, as I knew Klaus Podoll, with whom I run this website, had contact to her. But WOW, my name in a book of Hustvedt. Now I couldn't wait any longer.

Is it still worth to write a review? (More)

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Migraine in the US sports news—a great opportunity to raise awareness about this widespread disease. An opportunity missed for German players, who seem too embarrassed to admit that they suffer from this disorder.

Fighting migraines begins with awareness.

Every other week I read in the sports news about players missing a game because of a migraine. 

For instance, November last year the NYT reported in its sports section that Percy Harvin, an American football receiver (Minnesota Vikings) missed practice for two days because of a migraine headache. In the same month, I read that another player got not only migraine headache but also other migraine symptoms as a result of a sport injury. Eric Shelton, an American football running back, suffered a helmet-to-helmet collision and lost all feeling in his extremities for one minute, a possible migraine symptom. The next day he was numb from the waist down. This could be one of the possible symptoms occurring in the resolution and recovery stage of a migraine attack. Furthermore, as a result of this injury, Shelton has been unable to work for some time because of migraine headaches that persisted.  (More)

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In Berlin, a new Collaborative Research Centre "Control of self-organizing nonlinear systems" is set up. One focus will be on mathematical neuroscience. The goal is to understand the brain's control mechanisms and how their failure leads to diseases. The precise language of mathematics offers the promise for better diagnostic and therapeutic techniques.

My deluxe brain made it on the homepage of my university, the Technische Universität Berlin. It is gone by now, but it was there for four days on the occasion of the anoucment of our new Collaborative Research Centre 910: Control of self-organizing nonlinear systems. The centre is funded with €7 million over a period of four years.

Philipp Hövel (acting managing director), Sabine Klapp (vice-coordinator), my brain (deluxe version), and Eckehard Schöll (coordinator of the CRC 910, from left to right)

Well, it was only my brain anatomy model that you see above. I bought it some time ago and had to choose from over two dozen different models. The simplest (and cheapest) version would have sufficed for my usual purpose, that is, to demonstrate the path taken by a localized wave of overly excited neurons through the folded surface of the brain. This wave causes on its course neurological deficits in migraine called aura [1]. Anyway, I decided to go for the deluxe brain. Who wouldn't?  (More)

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I just read a comment about my visual migraine aura video in YouTube

The shaping and flashing of it is near perfect; however, it needs Color, and, some auras loop into a closed figure, while expanding outward. Your simulation seems most accurate near the end of it, when the aura is larger and wider. I'm very very pleased that so many people are doing simulated Auras for migraine sufferers, this is extremely important educational information. I wonder if anyone has studied to see if weed has any treatment effect on migraine? I would use it if so.

I guess that this questions was asked by many people and probably answered by some of them in a self-experiment.

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Medical information is often given in the web. Although diagnosing yourself or even getting medical advice from the web is definately not a good idea, you can assume greater responsibility for your health by staying informed.

Over the years, people have contacted me because they recognized their visual migraine aura symptoms in my computer simulations of such visual field defects, which are presented on various web sites. Some people who contacted me had not even been diagnosed before with migraine, but later were. My impression is that quite a lot often deal with their problem alone using self-prescribed drugs for their headaches.  (More)

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Can  the application of appropriate light during a migraine attack reduce its severity?

An article in Nature Neuroscience, published online two weeks ago, presents  "A neural mechanism for exacerbation of headache by light" (so its title). Bright light can worsening headaches. This is known to many of us from "memories of the painful mornings after the night before", so we read in the accompanying  News and Views. That is correct.

The article is about migraine headaches.  It proposes a mechanism how migraine headaches can be modulated by retinal input. If light can worsening a headache, can it also help? Many sufferers escape to a dark room. Is there an alternative? A question I would like to address is, which, if any, spatial or temporal frequencies attenuate a migraine attack? That would allow us to design much simpler medical devices than the migraine zapper is. 

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Therapeutic magnetic stimulation in migraine is widely discussed. Known as the migraine zapper, a transcranial magnetic stimulator became an FDA approved investigational medical device. But what about other external stimulation techniques, like electrical currents or light flashes? Should we invent migraine frizzlers and migraine scintillators, too, or is that all fringe science?

The application of transcranial stimulation at the beginning of a migraine attack may abort the attack or reduce its severity significantly for same patients.  This is tested in a randomized, sham stimulation controlled investigation to assess the safety and to demonstrate that the method is effective as an add-on therapy in reducing attacks.  (More)

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Modern thermodynamics provides concepts that elucidate certain aspects of migraines. While medical physics is traditionally related to diagnostic instruments, with these theoretical concepts, a new avenue opens up how physics enters clinical research.

I openly confess that I wrote the title to catch your attention, yet I believe that this phrase stands on solid scientific grounds.  (More)

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