Altered Effective Connectivity in Migraine Patients During Emotional Stimuli: a Multi-frequency Magnetoencephalography Study.

Abstract

Background: Migraine is a common and disabling primary headache associated with a wide range of psychiatric comorbidities. However, the mechanisms of emotion processing in migraine are not fully understood yet. The present study was designed to investigate the neural network during neutral, positive，and negative emotional stimuli in migraine suffers.Methods: We enrolled 24 migraine suffers and 24 age- and sex-matched controls in this study. Neuromagnetic brain activity was recorded by using a whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) system towards human faces expression pictures. MEG data were analyzed in the multi-frequency band of 1–100 Hz.Results: Migraine patients exhibited significantly enhanced effective connectivity from the prefrontal lobe to the temporal cortex during negative emotional stimuli in the gamma band(30-90Hz). Graph theory analysis revealed that patients had (1) an increased degree and clustering coefficient of connectivity in the delta band(1-4Hz) during positive emotional stimuli; (2) an increased degree of connectivity in the delta band(1-4Hz) during negative emotional stimuli.Conclusion: The results suggested individuals with migraine showed deviant effective connectivity when viewing human facial expressions in multi-frequency. The prefrontal-temporal pathway might be related to the altered negative emotion modulation in migraine. These findings may contribute to understanding the mechanism of the comorbidity of depression and anxiety in migraine and provide references for the comprehensive therapeutic plan.