• Weiping Yang, Bingqian Chu, Jiajia Yang, Yinghua Yu, Jinglong Wu, and Shengyuan Yu.
• Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, 3-1-1 Tsushima-Naka, 700-8530 Kitaku, Okayama, Japan. wu@mech.okayama-u.ac.jp.
• J Headache Pain. 2014 Jun 24; 15 (1): 4444.

BackgroundPhotophobia and phonophobia are the most prominent symptoms in patients with migraine without aura. Hypersensitivity to visual stimuli can lead to greater hypersensitivity to auditory stimuli, which suggests that the interaction between visual and auditory stimuli may play an important role in the pathogenesis of migraine. However, audiovisual temporal interactions in migraine have not been well studied. Therefore, our aim was to examine auditory and visual interactions in migraine.MethodsIn this study, visual, auditory, and audiovisual stimuli with different temporal intervals between the visual and auditory stimuli were randomly presented to the left or right hemispace. During this time, the participants were asked to respond promptly to target stimuli. We used cumulative distribution functions to analyze the response times as a measure of audiovisual integration.ResultsOur results showed that audiovisual integration was significantly elevated in the migraineurs compared with the normal controls (p < 0.05); however, audiovisual suppression was weaker in the migraineurs compared with the normal controls (p < 0.05).ConclusionsOur findings further objectively support the notion that migraineurs without aura are hypersensitive to external visual and auditory stimuli. Our study offers a new quantitative and objective method to evaluate hypersensitivity to audio-visual stimuli in patients with migraine.

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