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An MRA, or Magnetic Resonance Angiogram can be used to measure blood flow and diameters of arteries.
Here we review a ground breaking study by a young researcher by the name of Gus Schoonman, that threw large sections of the migraine science community into disarray, had all the big names scrambling to come up with explanations and excuses, and won Schoonman accolades and awards.
His experiment was brilliantly simple.
Schoonman induced migraine headaches using nitroglycerine in twenty seven patients, and gave five patients a placebo. Then, using an MRA, he measured the blood flow through the arteries inside the brain/skull in question, as well as their diameters.
He observed that there was no difference in either the blood flow or the diameters of the arteries listed below, inside the skull or brain, whether a migraine attack was present or absent. Nor was there any difference between the blood flow or diameter of the arteries between left or right side of the brain when the migraine attack was only present on one side of the head.
Schoonman thus proved conclusively in 2008 that the following arteries inside the brain and or skull, previously blamed for migraine, are not involved in migraine headaches at all:
- Basilar artery – Not involved in migraine. Basilar migraine is no longer a plausible diagnosis even though it is still dished out more than ten years after it was debunked.
- Internal carotid artery – this is artery that supplies the brain with blood – not involved in migraine
- Middle meningeal artery – not involved in migraine
- Middle cerebral artery – not involved in migraine
- Posterior cerebral arteries – not involved in migraine
Lastly, Schoonman measured the external carotid artery. He did this just at the point that the carotid artery splits in two, one branch going internal to the brain and feeding all the arteries listed above, and the second branch going external and feeding all the arteries outside of the skull that supply the head face and neck with blood.
For some strange reason Schoonman stopped his experiment at the very point that the external carotid artery branches off. This was a strange place to end his experiment given that no hard evidence exists anywhere to indicate that the external carotid artery is involved in migraine headache at the point that he chose to measured it.
Schoonman’s measurements internal to the brain were deserving of the awards he achieved. He put paid to decades of scientific deception based on obfuscation, data suppression, and outright lies in the medical literature. For some reason though, Schoonman stopped short of proving once again, the truth that has been proven countless times in countless experiments and measurements before him. That is the involvement of the TERMINAL, or END branches, of the external carotid artery in migraine headache.
These are the tiny branches of the arteries that run across your temple, (temporal artery), up the back of your head (occipital artery), behind your ear (posterior auricular artery), and many others. These are marked in the adjacent diagram.
Why Schoonman chose not to measure these arteries at the points that they are known to dilate, constrict, or over contract, only Schoonman can answer.
Sadly, Schoonman’s choice of point to measure the external carotid artery provided fertile but false ammunition for the opponents of medical truth, to use his great study as “evidence” that no arteries at all, either inside or outside of the brain, are involved in migraine headache.
This is a dangerous falsehood that has condemned hundred of millions of sufferers to lives of abject intractable chronic migraine pain, desperation, medication dependence, and intensification and chronification of their migraine headaches. Schoonman went so far as to back up this false sentiment regarding the terminal (end) branches in the diagram above with the concluding words “future migraine drugs may not need vas0-constriction”. It was a very sad way to end one of the greatest myth buster experiments in modern medicine.
Perhaps Schoonman knew where his bread was buttered? He had slayed the beast of INTERNAL (inside the brain) arterial dilation. Perhaps discretion was the better part of valour and he did not want to dance too brightly in front of his powerful colleagues? Perhaps Schoonman had never looked at the data on the TERMINAL branches of the EXTERNAL (outside the brain) carotid artery in migraine, and therefore it did not occur to him to measure them?
This is a diagram of the nerve fibres, and their attachment to the TERMINAL branches of the EXTERNAL carotid artery, also known as the “migraine arteries”. Of specific interest is that these fibres are more dense in chronic migraine sufferers than in controls. Of further interest is that these fibres reach into the layer of smooth muscle the lines the inside of these arteries. More about that and how sufferers can benefit from this knowledge and understanding soon.
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View the Original migraine artery study at this link: Migraine headache is not associated with cerebral or meningeal vasodilatationça 3T magnetic resonance angiography study.
Interesting references on migraine artery studies:
Focal headache during balloon inflation in the internal carotid and middle cerebral arteries.
Reliability of the nitroglycerin provocative test in the diagnosis of neurovascular headaches.
