After a common heart surgery, some patients experience migraines with visual auras — temporary vision disturbances, such as flashing lights and zigzag lines. The reason for this unusual complication was a mystery, but now, research hints that blood clots in the brain may be the culprit.
“These [clots] have previously not been thought to result in any symptoms or to have any clear adverse consequences,” study co-author Dr. Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Live Science in an email.
The new study, published July 7 in the journal Heart Rhythm, proposes a new theory about why these mysterious migraines manifest.
A sign of something serious?
To treat arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats, doctors perform a catheter ablation, which involves inserting a tube into the heart to burn or scar any heart tissue driving the irregularity. About 360,000 people in the U.S. undergo the surgery each year.
Different catheter ablation techniques can be used depending on the location of the faulty heart tissue. One strategy, called “transseptal puncture,” creates an opening between two heart chambers, whereas another, known as the “retrograde approach,” doesn’t require this hole to be made.
But in the months following a catheter ablation, 2.3% of patients with no history of migraines with visual auras report these symptoms for the first time. The auras themselves typically appear just before or during a migraine attack.
These new symptoms are concerning because ischemic stroke, which occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked, is 2.6 times more likely in people under 45 who experience migraines with visual auras, and it’s 3.7 times more likely in women of that same age group who experience them. So these migraines could be harbingers of serious cardiovascular events.
Mysterious origin of visual auras
Scientists have several theories as to why catheter ablation might be linked to migraine. One theory posits that the hole created by transseptal puncture might trigger the complication by rerouting blood from its typical path.
Blood normally circulates from the right side of the heart to the lungs, then to the left side of the heart, and finally to the rest of the body, including the brain. However, a puncture could allow…
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