Opthalmic migraine

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I just had the symptoms for this on the right side of my peripheral vision. I looked it up. The site says a migraine doesn't always ensue. My question is has anyone ever started having migraines past age 50?

i get these types of migraines as well, but i have a history of migraines.

i used to get daily migraines with pain (sometimes the pain was less severe, but the other symptoms would be the same), and took medicines like Zolmitriptan several times a week. now i take a beta blocker for blood pressure anyways, which also helps with migraines.

after a couple of years of taking the beta blocker, i started to get weird visual symptoms and went to the optometrist. i was diagnosed with ophthalmic/ocular migraines.

so for me, it was just an extension of my regular migraines.

have you checked your blood pressure lately?

I thought the definition of migraine was an extremely severe headache so I'm not clear about a painless migraine. I experienced no pain last night when the visual thing happened. Throughout my life my blood pressure has always been on the low side of normal but recently it's been climbing up. I get it checked every time I see my meds management person. The thing is I can breathe deeply a few times and when they take it again it has dropped significantly.

pain is just a symptom of a migraine, so it is possible to have painless migraines (but it isn't terribly common, or perhaps people don't go to the doctor unless they have pain associated).

my high blood pressure started off similar to yours - what the doctors call "white coat" high blood pressure in my early 20s, due to anxiety at seeing the doctor. if they got me to lie down a minute or somesuch, it would lower to normal levels. eventually, it would not lower after a minute and medicine was required. i started off on an ACE inhibitor, then moved onto beta blocks (which also help with anxiety, incidentally).

I don't know if this is useful information, but I've had optic/opthalmic migraines since I was a teen, and (so far) they've not turned into normal, painful migraines.

I was seeing shimmering and zig zagging lights on the right side of my peripheral vision.

Found a good animation --

http://www.migraine-aura.org/content/e2 ... ex_en.html

Did it look like that?

Kind of like a combination of a few of them. There was color around the jagged lines of light, but the light was more prominent. The jagged lines were larger than depicted in one of the examples and they seemed to radiate out. They shimmered. Apparently "migraine" means "half brain" indicating that it occurs on one side, but what exactly is it?

The explanation I've heard is that blood vessels in the brain spasm, which causes them to release some substance which then causes neighboring ones to do the same, so there's an expanding wave of twitching blood vessels, I guess. Sort of like a temporary stroke, I guess.

But I saw someone somewhere mention a new theory, that it may be more like epilepsy, but I haven't gotten around to looking that up yet.

This reminds me of that woman who was a brain researcher and had a massive stroke -- when she realized it was stroke she said she thought (for a moment), "wow, this is so cool..."