Mood Issues/Emotional Auras?
I have had migraines for more than 20 years but they have changed within the past year, becoming more frequent and with more defined and classic prodrome and aura symptoms. For prodrome I generally have energetic/focused mood and frequent urination as much as a day before and up close to the headache (within hours or overlapping the start of it) I get loss of concentration, word-finding difficulty and some sound and light sensitivity. An of Alice in Wonderland moment for excitement. It's mostly pretty routine and my pain is not bad but 3 times in the past 4 months I have had more severe migraines that came with extreme shifts in mood just around when headache started to hit. They are hard to explain...like the opposite of rose-coloured glasses. One minute I'm normal and the next I'm panicky, sad and angry all at once. My entire outlook on everything gets distorted, the closest word for it might be paranoia. It lasts less than an hour but by then the damage to my social life is done. I actually yelled at my best friend and accused her of attacking me on Facebook, amongst other horrifying moments. (Just for clarity I have no mood issues outside of migraines and am known for being extremely calm normally. I sometimes have some slight irritability during the prodrome, but the worst of that is sarcastic comments about bad drivers and less patience to wait in long lines.) The placement of it right where my other aura symptoms are suggests that it's one of them but emotional auras seem to be rare in migraine, and more common in epilepsy.
Does anyone else experience this? Or know of any resources on it?
Hi there
, Thanks for reaching out & for your question. As you wait for others to possibly chime in to share their experiences, I wanted to share that irritability although not commonly discussed, can be a common migraine symptom especially just before an attack. You might appreciate this article. https://migraine.com/blog/migraine-symptoms-anger-irritability/. Let me know if this overview is in line with what you are experiencing! Take good care! Hopefully you have a good headache doc that can help answer questions. I, too, have that wild blend of brain weirdness, migraine and seizure activity, and it took forever to get a diagnosis. No one believed me until I had an EEG done. Have you had an EEG, and if so what results? Your symptoms sound similar to mine, except that I'm more withdrawn socially.
EEGs were all negative. Even the (less specific) ones done during sleep studies.
To be fair, seizures deep in the temporal lobes are very difficult to catch on a regular EEG, as opposed to implanting the electrodes. But who wants to get electrodes implanted if their symptoms are equally well explained by a disorder that is definitely in their family (migraine) as opposed to one that is related but only might be in one family member (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy) who also has migraines that might have caused them?
