Approximately one-third of patients with migraine will experience an aura on at least 1 occasion, and these will usually evolve across 5 to 20 minutes and last for at least an hour. Aura symptoms are characterized by fully reversible visual, sensory or speech phenomena that can either precede or accompany a migraine attack. The International Headache Society has established criteria for the diagnosis of aural migraine.
Instructions
Diagnostic Criteria for Migraine With Aura
1. A patient must have at least 2 migraine attacks with at least 3 of the following criteria: at least 1 aura symptom, aura symptoms that last at least 4 minutes or a succession of aura symptoms that occur across at least 4 minutes, no aura symptom that lasts longer than 1 hour, and headache that occurs either at least 1 hour after aura or at the onset of aura symptoms.
2. Aura symptom must have at least 1 of the following features: bilateral visual symptoms, unilateral tingling and/or numbness, unilateral weakness and speech difficulty.
3. In each type of aura symptom (i.e., visual, sensory and speech), positive and negative symptoms can occur. Positive symptoms are defined as disturbances that would not normally occur in an individual, or "added disturbances." An example of a positive sensory symptom would be tingling, and an example of a positive visual symptom would be spots, lines or other phenomena that are not normally seen in the visual field. Negative symptoms are defined by the absence of a normal characteristic experienced by someone, or "absent disturbances," such as the absence of vision (i.e., vision loss) or feeling (i.e., numbness) or difficulty speaking .
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