Migraine sufferers are often triggered by the weather, and research suggests warming temperatures and more extreme weather events worsen attacks. Migraines have long had an intimate relationship with the elements. Alongside stress and hormones, fluctuations in meteorological conditions are one of the most commonly cited triggers for an attack. "Patients will often say that they can predict the weather," says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center at University of Cincinnati and president of the US National Headache Foundation. They may foresee rainfall two or three days out, as a blossoming migraine alerts them to a drop in barometric pressure.

Research on the visual patterns that foreshadow migraines may reveal clues on how painful headaches arise from the brain even though it has no pain receptors. Colorful zig-zag lines flash in the corner of an eye, while the tunnel vision makes most of the view obscured. Migraine with aura is usually painless, though in large majority of cases means the real migraine is about to kick in. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. "It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed," she says. "That pain was worse than childbirth." Rosenkranz's migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz's 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a "red beam behind her eardrums." It didn't occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses.

Migraine is a high-prevalence and disabling neurological disorder. However, information migraine management in real-world settings could be limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported by migraine sufferers; (ii) develop a platform-independent text classification system for automatically detecting self-reported migraine-related posts, and (iii) conduct analyses of the self-reported posts to assess the utility of social media for studying this problem. We manually annotated 5750 Twitter posts and 302 Reddit posts. Our system achieved an F1 score of 0.90 on Twitter and 0.93 on Reddit. Analysis of information posted by our 'migraine cohort' revealed the presence of a plethora of relevant information about migraine therapies and patient sentiments associated with them. Our study forms the foundation for conducting an in-depth analysis of migraine-related information using social media data.

On a typical day, general practitioners (GPs) make multiple decisions when diagnosing and treating patients. They have limited access to immediate imaging diagnostics and tests and rely more on the patient's history and clinical examination than the second and tertiary stages of healthcare. To establish a diagnosis, a GP starts with the chief complaint, makes a hypothesis with a perceptual list of differential diagnoses, and asks the patient a series of targeted questions to include or exclude diagnoses. The GP then performs a clinical examination to confirm further or refute diagnoses while deciding if further diagnostic tests are needed. When the GP has reached a diagnostic conclusion, with a reasonable degree of certainty, he makes the diagnosis.

Decision support systems play an important role in medical fields as they can augment clinicians to deal more efficiently and effectively with complex decision-making processes. In the diagnosis of headache disorders, however, existing approaches and tools are still not optimal. On the one hand, to support the diagnosis of this complex and vast spectrum of disorders, the International Headache Society released in 1988 the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD), now in its 3rd edition: a 200 pages document classifying more than 300 different kinds of headaches, where each is identified via a collection of specific nontrivial diagnostic criteria. On the other hand, the high number of headache disorders and their complex criteria make the medical history process inaccurate and not exhaustive both for clinicians and existing automatic tools. To fill this gap, we present HEAD-ASP, a novel decision support system for the diagnosis of headache disorders. Through a REST Web Service, HEAD-ASP implements a dynamic questionnaire that complies with ICHD-3 by exploiting two logical modules to reach a complete diagnosis while trying to minimize the total number of questions being posed to patients. Finally, HEAD-ASP is freely available on-line and it is receiving very positive feedback from the group of neurologists that is testing it.

Though it may sound like something from science fiction, brain zapping -- or neuro-electrostimulation, as it's known -- is already being used to treat a variety of ailments. Researchers at Boston University recently reported that zapping the brains of older people could restore their thinking powers to those of someone in their 20s. 'Neuro-electrostimulation makes sense because the brain is an organ that works by electrical impulses, and there are many different techniques that can alter the brain's electrical activity, possibly for a therapeutic effect,' says Dr Lucia Li, a neurologist and clinical lecturer at Imperial College London. The brain-zapping treatment can be given via caps, headbands, or electrodes stuck to the scalp or even implanted in the brain. In some types of treatment, such as electroconvulsive therapy, used to treat severe depression, brain zapping is so powerful, patients have to be anaesthetised in case they hurt themselves.

Want to watch this again later? Report Need to report the video? Report Need to report the video? Need to report the video? This feature is not available right now.