Neurophysiological Characterization of Treatment Response Following the Initiation of Prophylactic Therapy in Episodic Migraine

This study aims to improve the pathophysiological understanding of migraine in in a longitudinal observational study investigating changes of established neurophysiological and imaging parameters in line with changes of the clinical phenotype.

The study's focus is the investigation of mechanisms that are directly related to the cyclic character of migraine and its core structures. In this context, the primary endpoint is a change in the nociceptive blink reflex, an established brain stem reflex to study the trigemino-spinal system, associated with changes in migraine frequency and severity. In order to reliably detect changes in the trigeminal pain system, investigations are performed in patients before starting a prophylactic therapy and 3 months afterwards. Several secondary endpoints are used to evaluate changes of multimodal sensory and cortical information processing. Cerebral imaging will include examinations of structural and network effects of altered migraine disease activity.