Functional neuroimaging study reveals persistent network connectivity disruptions in migraine without aura, indicating disease-specific neural alterations independent of mood and sleep.
Key Points
To examine local brain activity and functional network alterations in patients with migraine without aura while controlling for emotional and sleep disturbances.
Acquired resting-state fMRI scans from 39 patients with migraine without aura (MwoA) and 26 healthy controls (HC).
Calculated amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (zALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and independent component analysis (ICA), adjusting for age, sex, education, depression (SDS), anxiety (SAS), and sleep quality (PSQI).
MwoA patients exhibited decreased zALFF in the bilateral inferior temporal gyrus and decreased ReHo in the left caudate nucleus (p < 0.05), but these local differences lost significance after adjusting for SDS, SAS, and PSQI scores.
Large-scale functional connectivity reductions persisted across 13 of 23 ICA components after covariate adjustment, with one network surviving Bonferroni correction (p_corrected = 0.019).
Right precuneus functional connectivity positively correlated with Pain Catastrophizing Scale scores (r = 0.426, p = 0.007, surviving Bonferroni correction).