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Nearly half of patients with migraine with aura are found to have a heart defect, study finds

Abergavenny Roger Dobson

A study has found that nearly half of a group of patients with long term migraine with aura had a heart defect. The defect was a right to left shunt caused by a patent foramen ovale.

The study, by cardiologists and neurologists at University Hospital, Bern, Switzerland, appeared online ahead of print publication on 7 September in Neurology (www.neurology.org/papbyrecent.html ). It used transoesophageal contrast echocardiography to examine the participants.

The study looked at a group of 93 patients who had had migraine with aura for an average of 18.5 years and 93 healthy control patients without migraine. The most common right to left shunt in adults, a patent foramen ovale (a remnant of fetal circulation), is present in around a quarter of the general population.

Forty four of the patients with migraine with aura and 16 of the control patients had the defect (odds ratio 4.56 . . . [Full text of this article]

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