Last year Tracey McMahon woke up in the middle of the night with a blinding headache – “At first I thought it was a bad migraine.”
But, as she remembers, “when I got up to go to the bathroom, everything suddenly turned black and I couldn’t see anything. That had never happened before, so I was really worried ‘.
Tracey, 43, a nurse in mental health care, who lives together with Vrouw Deena, 58, a retired official in Rossendale, Lancashire, adds: “Deena still saw me in the bedroom stock, but I couldn’t move because everything was black.”
From the age of 11, Tracy suffered from migraine with aura – severe headache with neurological symptoms such as seeing bright lights and tingling on one side of the body.
But her attacks had been increasingly serious and frequent in the previous year, even as a result of more than once on a line to A&E.
“I would come from work and suddenly felt tired and woozy and lay down on the couch,” she says.
‘When I got up, it felt like someone had beaten me in my head with a baseball bat.
‘I also had light hanging on the left side of my face and a throbbing pain that beamed from my eye to the back of my head.
Tracey McMahon has had a serious headache and seeing fierce lights since her 11th migraine and experiences a tingling sensation on one side of the body
It is not known what migraine causes, but some people think that certain triggers can cause them, such as: their menstruation starts, feel anxious or stressed or have too much caffeine
“And I could not tolerate exposure to light. I actually went to A&E with a blanket that covered my head. ‘
She was convinced that it was a stroke, but after waiting for eight hours for the Emergency Department, Tracey was told by a doctor that she had just had another bad migraine, because a CT scan did not show any signs of a stroke.
However, Tracey believes that she may have suffered a mini-branch, coupled with a migraine patient; Migraine is known as a risk factor for a stroke among younger people – often as a result of a non -diagnosed hole in the heart (with which we were all born, but with which some people, such as Tracey, never close).
In the following months, Tracey (not aware of the hole in her heart) discovered that her painful attacks came daily, forcing them to take a few weeks off.
“My memory was bad and I couldn’t find the right words when I spoke,” she says.
‘I also had some left-sided weakness and poor light sensitivity and could not go outside in the public areas because it would cause an attack I went back to work, my office had to be poorly illuminated.
“I started to have kaleidoscope, where I would see a rainbow of pink/yellow and blue/green colors.”
Delivered paid tracey private to have an MRI – the gold standard for finding signs of a stroke.
Tracey believes she suffered a mini stroke, but hospital scans did not show that this was the case
Professor Pankaj Sharma, a consultant -neurologist at Imperial College London Hospital, says that more and more evidence is showing the relationship between migraine and strokes
But it also found no evidence of a stroke.
Instead, the neurologist has diagnosed a thunderstorm headache, a severe headache that suddenly starts and causes explosive pain.
He has prescribed Topiramate, an epilepsy medication used to treat migraine, which reduces the migraine attacks once a week.
When Tracey suffered a full attack last November, with crushing pain, double vision and a bad balance.
She called an ambulance, but when the paramedics heard her medical history, “they rejected my symptoms as a migraine attack, told me to take my migraine medication -and then leave.”
The next morning she had pins and needles in her face, arm and left leg, a ‘gravity’ in her left leg and unstable when she tried to walk.
Again, Deena rushed to A&E – but again, a CT scan found nothing abnormal.
‘But when the nurse asked to lift my arms above my head, my left arm fell and they noticed that I had Nystagmus (wobbly, uncontrolled eye movement).
This time, for fear of a possible stroke, the Tracey staff admitted to a stroke department and prescribed aspirin and clopidogrel, an anti-clotting medicine.
Tracey eventually had an MRI scan 48 hours later that this time found a small clot in the brain stem (the structure that connects the brain and spinal cord and regulates vital body functions) and this had caused a stroke.
Fortunately it was not big enough to justify surgery and she received clot-busting medicines to solve it.
“It was still a shock – I was only 42 – I gave up smoking 11 years earlier and had no high blood pressure and had just lost the 2nd,” says Tracey.
“So I had none of the traditional risk factors for strokes.”
More than 100,000 people a year in the UK have a stroke, in which the blood supply to the brain is blocked by a clot or bleeding on the brain.
One in four occurs in people of working age, including 400 children.
Up to half of the strokes in younger people – those younger than 50 – are cryptogenogenic, which means that they have no clear cause.
A recent study in the Stroke magazine has shed new light on the possible cause of some cryptogenic strokes in younger people.
Researchers from Helsinki University Hospital discovered that adults younger than 50 had the risk of stroke due to non-traditional stroke risk factors, such as migraine patient, rather than traditional stroke risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.
Such as Professor Pankaj Sharma, a consultant -neurologist at Imperial College London Hospital, explains: ‘In the past ten to 15 years it is increasingly recognized that Migraine is a risk factor for a stroke.
‘The stroke risk is usually higher with classic migraine, also known as a migraine with aura [which includes symptoms such as visual disturbances or numbness and tingling]Instead of ordinary migraine without aura.
“Classic migraine doubles or triples your risk of stroke,” says Professor Sharma.
“That sounds terrible, but the risk of a stroke in your 20S is very small – so even if it is double the risk, it is still a small risk, it is about the same stroke risk that is associated with taking the combined contraceptive pill.”
Exactly how Migraine can activate a blow remains unclear.
But Professor Sharma says they can be connected to a condition that a patent foramen ovale (PFO) or a ‘hole in the heart’ is called, where a small opening between the two rooms of the heart does not close completely after birth.
“A hole in the heart is one of the most common causes of strokes in younger people and one of the first things I look for in my patients,” explains Professor Sharma.
‘We were all born with this, but when we are born, this close -up when a baby cries and takes his first breath.
“However, with one in four people, the gap does not close, and this brings them a slightly higher risk of a stroke.”
A theory is that PFOs can cause migraine because they throw away micro bubbles and microemboli (small clots) in the brain, which, although not large enough to cause a stroke-can cause a migraine attack.
‘We think that if we close a PFO with an operation with someone who has had a stroke or a mini stroke [a transient ischemic attack or TIA, where the blood supply to the brain is temporarily interrupted]Many of those people report that their migraine are improving, “explains Professor Sharma.
When Tracey’s Hart was investigated with an echocardiogram in December last year, this unveiled a previously not – diagnosed PFO – and she believes that this may have contributed to her serious migraine and stroke.
She is now waiting for doctors to decide whether she is suitable for surgery to close the PFO.
Professor Sharma says that a different cause of a stroke in younger people is in the neck – these can be torn by trauma as caused by playing rugby or football, or ‘beauty salon syndrome’, sitting on a sink with your neck bent back (although this is rare).
“There is usually an existing weakness in the artery there in those cases,” he says.
The battle damaged Tracey’s eyesight – she then had a double vision for three months and at one point she was afraid she would have to give up nursing. “I was devastated that I was so badly affected at such a young age,” she says.
But her vision has since improved after doing special eye exercises.
Professor Sharma says that classic migraine symptoms that can simulate from a stroke – for example weakness on the left and speech disorders – so it can be extremely difficult for the general public to keep the symptoms apart.
‘My advice is that if you doubt whether it is a stroke or a migraine the first time it happens, then you have to call and check out 999 – there is so much more that we can do to treat a stroke when we see people as quickly as possible.
‘We would rather reassure you that it is not a stroke than to have your symptoms risk on time.
“Once you have had one migraine attack, you will recognize the symptoms if you subsequently have it.”
Tracey says: ‘There are so many others like me what I have read about on the online forum of different strokes, a charity for patients with a younger stroke, who say they have been sent home as a CT scan that did not appear their stroke.
‘We must be assessed immediately with MRIS. Looking back, I wonder if my deteriorating migraine attacks may have been a warning signal of my PFO and that I ran the risk of a stroke. ‘
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