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Migraine and Reward System—Or Is It Aversive?

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Abstract

Migraine is a debilitating neurological disorder with grave consequences for both the individual and society. This review will focus on recent literature investigating how brain structures implicated in reward and aversion contribute to the genesis of migraine pain. There exist many overlapping and interacting brain regions within pain and reward circuitry that contribute to negative affect and subjective experience of pain. The emotional component of pain has been argued to be a greater metric of quality of life than its sensory component, and thus understanding the processes that influence this pain characteristic is essential to developing novel treatment strategies for mitigating migraine pain. We emphasize and provide evidence that abnormalities within the mesolimbic cortical reward pathways contribute to migraine pain and that there are structural and functional neuroplasticity within the overlapping brain regions common to both pain and reward.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Drs. Chris Evans and Amynah Pradhan for their comments and critique of the paper.

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Conflict of Interest

Dr. Catherine M. Cahill received a grant from NIH (R01, but not on the topic of this article). Dr. Cahill has travel reimbursement for lectures from McGill Pain Centre, AAG Western University of Health Sciences, and American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry.

Dr. Christopher Cook and Dr. Sarah Pickens each declare no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care, 837 Health Sciences Rd, 2117 Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Catherine M. Cahill

  2. Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care, University of California, Irvine, 2226, Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, Irvine, CA, 92617, USA

    Sarah Pickens

  3. Department of Pharmacology, University of California, Irvine, 2226, Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility, Irvine, CA, 92617, USA

    Christopher Cook

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  1. Catherine M. Cahill
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Correspondence to Catherine M. Cahill.

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Cahill, C.M., Cook, C. & Pickens, S. Migraine and Reward System—Or Is It Aversive?. Curr Pain Headache Rep 18, 410 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-014-0410-y

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