Study of the Glymphatic System in Migraine

Sublingual nitroglycerin will be used to provoke spontaneous-like migraine attacks in migraine patients. A dose of 0.9 mg of sublingual nitroglycerin will be used. The same dose will be administrated to controls.

The following brain MRI sequences will be acquired before and after nitroglycerin administration: fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), 3D T1-weighted inversion recovery prepared gradient echo, diffusion weighted sequence and 3D susceptibility weighted images.

Plasma levels of neuropeptides involed in migraine will be measured using commercially available enzyme-linked immune-sorbent assay (ELISA) kits. All ELISA will be performed by the same experienced technician who will be blinded for the clinical diagnosis.

Sleep architecture will be investigated using the Sleep Profiler. Sleep Profiler is medical device with CE mark which is produced by Advanced Brain Monitoring and distributed throughout Italy exclusively by Medigas. Sleep staging will be automatically performed for 30-second epochs throughout a dedicated software and a standardized and validated procedure. Frontopolar EEG signal waveforms will be visually inspected to confirm the accuracy of the auto-staging.