Ocular Migraine - What is This 'Highly Dangerous' Migraine and How to Accurately Know If I Have It?

Many people think that migraine headache is just a migraine headache. We have a misconception that there is only one type of migraine and that there are no other types. Medically speaking there is a number of different types of migraine and ocular migraine is one them.

What is Ocular Migraine?

This type of migraine is commonly caused visual disorders. The strange thing about this type of migraine is that you may or may not suffer from an actual headache.

Symptoms

Ocular migraine is a migraine without the headache. What it does is; it distorts the images seen by the eye. It causes the distortion at the center of the image and moves to one side. It only affects one eye at a time,so it is not the cause of temporary blindness.

As the migraine progresses, the images that you see may change to color gray or the image may be wavy. Medical experts have different understanding of what ocular migraine is.

Others say that age is the primary cause of this migraine. On the other hand, others say that is commonly seen in young adults. But whatever the case, it is frightening to think that you may lose your sight just because of this.

Some experts describe ocular migraine as a disturbance in your vision that does not cause headache. Some say that it is a one-sided blind spot and can last for less than an hour accompanied by a headache.

The bottom line is, if you have visual disturbance of an aura in one of your eyes then you may have ocular migraine. It is safe to assume that it may or may not be accompanied by headache.

oBlind spots in your field of vision: An example of this is; if you are looking at a flower and you are not seeing the center of it. Another one is if you are watching TV and you only see the sides but not see the center. The reason why this happens is because one of your eyes is affected by ocular migraine.

oWhen you are looking through the affected eye you see a shade of grey in what you see. It is like watching TV behind a thin grey cloth.

oAnother symptom is when you look through the affected eye and you see something like rain streaming down a window.

Episodes of ocular type of migraine do not last that long. You may feel that you will never be able to see clearly again but rest assured that what you see is only temporary and will not cause long term damage to your eye.

When experiencing migraine episodes, it may interfere with your regular activities like driving or reading.

How to Test for Ocular Migraine

One way to easily test is by closing one eye and look through the other one. Look for the symptoms described above and if you open the other eye and the symptoms stop then you have ocular migraine. If the symptoms do not stop even after opening the other eye then you have traditional migraine aura.