A Hypothalamic Mechanism Regulates the Duration of a Migraine Attack: Insights from Microstructural and Temporal Complexity of Cortical Functional Networks Analysis

Camillo Porcaro, Antonio Di Renzo, Emanuele Tinelli, Vincenzo Parisi, Cherubino Di Lorenzo, Francesca Caramia, Marco Fiorelli, Giada Giuliani, Ettore Cioffi, Stefano Seri, Vittorio Di Piero, Francesco Pierelli, Giorgio Di Lorenzo, Gianluca Coppola*, Antonino Tuttolomondo (Editor), Irene Simonetta (Editor)

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The role of the hypothalamus and the limbic system at the onset of a migraine attack has recently received significant interest. We analyzed diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) parameters of the entire hypothalamus and its subregions in 15 patients during a spontaneous migraine attack and in 20 control subjects. We also estimated the non-linear measure resting-state functional MRI BOLD signal’s complexity using Higuchi fractal dimension (FD) and correlated DTI/fMRI findings with patients’ clinical characteristics. In comparison with healthy controls, patients had significantly altered diffusivity metrics within the hypothalamus, mainly in posterior ROIs, and higher FD values in the salience network (SN). We observed a positive correlation of the hypothalamic axial diffusivity with migraine severity and FD of SN. DTI metrics of bilateral anterior hypothalamus positively correlated with the mean attack duration. Our results show plastic structural changes in the hypothalamus related to the attacks severity and the functional connectivity of the SN involved in the multidimensional neurocognitive processing of pain. Plastic changes to the hypothalamus may play a role in modulating the duration of the attack.
Original languageEnglish
Article number13238
Number of pages12
JournalInternational Journal of Molecular Sciences
Volume23
Issue number21
Early online date31 Oct 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).

Keywords

  • resting-state networks (RSN)
  • fractal dimension (FD)
  • migraine ictal
  • hypothalamus
  • diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)

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