Brain Advance Access originally published online on December 19, 2008
Brain 2009 132(1):6-7; doi:10.1093/brain/awn321
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Scientific Commentary |
The vascular theory of migraine—a great story wrecked by the facts
Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA E-mail: peter.goadsby@ucsf.edu
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
For much of the later part of the 20th century, a rather straightforward concept dominated thinking about migraine; first proposed in some part by Willis (1664
) and best articulated by Wolff (1948), the theory explained the pain of migraine to be due to dilation of cranial vessels. By the latter part of the 19th century, neuronal theories had also been well articulated (Liveing, 1873) and, indeed, Gowers (1888) seemed happy with that concept. It is remarkable that three key approaches revived the vascular theory in