KCBS-TV reporter Serene Branson's now infamous garbled on-air appearance during last week's Grammy Awards is revealing how migraines can be so much more than headaches.
After speculation roiled for days about what may have caused the Los Angeles-based reporter to start speaking in jumbled nonsense during her live on-air report from the Grammys last week (Was she drunk? Did she suffer a stroke?), Branson said in a TV interview with her station that the cause was most likely migraine.
That night, she said, she started to get "a really bad headache," and things got strange from there.
"At around 10 o'clock that night I was sitting in the live truck with my field producer and the photographer and I was starting to look at some of my notes," she said in the interview. "I started to think, the words on the page are blurry and I could notice that my thoughts were not forming the way they normally do."
This might come as a surprise to those who don't suffer from migraines -- and even to some who do.
The fact is that migraines are complicated neurological events that come in a myriad of forms. As a migraine sufferer myself, I can attest that they can strike in many different ways -- even for one person.
One of my earliest migraine memories is seeing lines of words suddenly float off the page of a book I was reading and start rotating in circles. These kinds of eye tricks are one form of migraine aura -- a condition experienced by about one in five people before a migraine.
Sometimes I have only aura and no head pain and sometimes it goes straight to throbbing headache. At times I've slurred my speech during a migraine, sometimes I vomit and sometimes I'm functional.
In Branson's case, she told her doctors she felt numbness on the right side of her face that affected her speech. She knew what she wanted to say, but somehow could not get the words out.
Considering an estimated 28 million Americans suffer from migraines, you can imagine how complicated the diagnosis can get.
"The problem with migraines is they seem to be a very heterogeneous disorder," Lawrence Newman, a neurologist at St. Luke's Roosevelt and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, told me in an interview.
It is actually telling that Branson's apparent migraine had symptoms similar to a stroke. While a stroke can have lasting damage on the brain, it's believed that migraines are mostly harmless -- once they pass. Yet research in 2007 suggested that women who experience migraines accompanied by visual auras could be at slightly higher risk for stroke, especially if they smoke. The research only identified the link, not the reason why.
In fact, doctors aren't even sure what causes migraine. The condition was long thought to be caused by swollen blood vessels in the brain, although recent research suggests that may be more a result of the headache, not the cause.
Some research has suggested that migraines begin when arteries at the back of the brain spasm and lead to a reduction in neural activity throughout the brain. This reduction may be linked to the migraine aura.
According to the Mayo Clinic's information page on the condition, "imbalances in brain chemicals, including serotonin" may also be involved.
Whatever the cause, migraines offer a window into the brain's complexity that science has barely even begun to understand. It's too bad they're also so horribly unpleasant.
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