Attention in Migraines: The Efficacy of Neurofeedback Mindfulness in Migraine Management
Date
2024-04-17
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0001-9728-6049
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Doctoral
Abstract
Migraine headache is one of the most well-known causes of disability worldwide and has an adverse impact on both social and personal dimensions of the headache sufferers. While there is still an ongoing discussion over migraine etiology, a cognitive approach to the cause and possible treatment of migraine headaches could bring “attention” under spotlight. I principally focus on a cognitive outlook for the literature review of cortical hyperexcitability and investigate “attention” as a missing piece of disability in this headache disorder. Initially, I rely on providing event-related potentials (ERP) evidence for attentional deficiency in migraines. Subsequently, I explore nonpharmacological treatments that could address such attention impairment. Neurofeedback and mindfulness are two of the most familiar nonpharmaceutical alternatives for migraine treatment and I compare how the marriage of these two attention-based treatments is different from a simple attention-based control intervention. For this, I report a longitudinal Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) that investigated 8 weeks of neurofeedback mindfulness (NM) (n=34) compared to listening to an audiobook task routine (n=27) for the same amount of time and daily routine (10 min/day). While both interventions significantly decreased headache disability and severity as well as anxiety across all the migraineurs, the NM participants increased their headache management self-efficacy compared to those of the control group. This evidence explains that although a regular attention task routine could be helpful for migraineurs, NM is efficient with improving participants’ self-agency which is considered as an important component of migraine management in connection with interoceptive awareness. I elaborate on how the introduced NM technique could be a promising and novel routine for migraine management.
Description
Keywords
Migraine, attention, neurofeedback, mindfulness, headache management
Citation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
Psychology
Program
Psychology