'Silent' migraines?

[oldoakknives]

Just 'Google' search for 'eye migraine' and click on images.

You'll probably see the kind of 'looking through broken lenses' views I see when this happens. No headache or pain, just looking at a strange distorted world.

I normally take some paracetamol and leave my desk and monitor to 'check stock' or something in the warehouse for 5-10 minutes. Just goes and back to normal again. Doctor doesn't seem concerned if I mention it as being a pointer to anything serious. Just a bit scary when it first happens.

Hope this helps someone.
Ian

[antojohno]

I wonder if this could be what i've suffered with randomly over the last year or so. Every now and again i get what i can only describe as a blurred, half ring in my peripheral vision. Never really suffered headaches, unless ive woke up feeling worse for wear after a few drinks. :)

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[robt]

Weirdly, I've been a chronic migraine sufferer all my life but almost never get any sort of visual aura. As I write this I am having one of these "silent" migraines. No pain or any other symptoms, basically the complete opposite of what I normally get.

I'm getting distorted rings (actually more of a C shape, not a complete ring) around my fovea. Both eyes, but the left is much worse than the right. Af first I thought it was that thing you get from staring at a bright light, but instead of fading quickly, it slowly got more intense. Also there's a weird colour-cycling kind of effect which you don't get from just tired retinas. The ring is gradually moving outwards.

Gonna take a bit of a screen break for a while and see if it goes away.

[robt]

I normally take some paracetamol and leave my desk and monitor to 'check stock' or something in the warehouse for 5-10 minutes. Just goes and back to normal again.

So mine seems to have gone away for now. I was thinking about this comment though.

You might want to try something other than paracetamol, if this happens to you a lot. Paracetamol is an anagesic, so isn't likely to do anything if you aren't experiencing any pain (unless it does something as a side-effect: paracetamol, along with many other drugs, does seem to have a lot of secondary effects that are still not well understood even after many years of research).

Aspirin or Ibuprofen on the other hand are anti-inflammatory, so may be more effective (do NOT take these together!). There's even the faster-acting Lysine form of Ibuprofen, sold as Nurofen Migraine but I think there are generic versions as well (I don't personally find Ibuprofen very effective for migraines though, so it's been a while since I tried this).

The other thing that is surprisingly effective at curing migraines is caffeine. You could try taking a few Pro Plus tablets (each tablet is 50mg of caffeine: an average shot of espresso has about 80mg). The odd thing about caffeine is that it is often considered to be a migraine trigger, but in my experience coffee itself, including decaf, can be a trigger as can caffeine withdrawal (which can come on quicker than you expect after a coffee), but pure caffeine in tablet form is more often helpful. The unfortunate thing about migraine is that very little is known for certain and it seems to affect everyone differently, so you need to experiment a bit. Caffeine can almost certainly be a cure for some and a trigger for others. Maybe even both (but IMO this is due to withdrawal effects).

Of course if the effect goes away after 5-10 minutes, that's probably not long enough for any drugs to take effect, so you might find that simply avoiding computer screens for a bit is all you need and it'll go away by itself.

I'll just finish up by saying that the thing I personally find most effective, the non-nuclear option where sumatriptan isn't quite necessary, is Anadin Extra. This is aspirin + paracetamol + caffeine. I don't know that the paracetamol would be necessary for an aura-only migraine, but it might be helpful to someone else reading this anyway. It seems the effect of this particular combination is much greater than the sum of its individual parts, so it's worth trying. Since everyone seems to be affected differently by migraines, it can take a bit of experimentation to find the most effective drug.