ABSTRACT
Retinal, or ‘‘monocular,’’ migraine is a rare and poorly understood disorder characterized by attacks of monocular visual impairment associated with migraine headache. Galezowski first described this entity as ‘‘ophthalmic megrim’’ in 1882 in a series of four patients with permanent retinal defects attributed to migraine (1). In two of these patients, prior attacks of migraine headache were associated with bouts of transient monocular visual loss (TMVL). Since then, a number of patients with monocular visual defects beginning before, during, or after attacks of otherwise typical migraine have been reported with various designations (2-46). The term ‘‘retinal migraine’’ was introduced by Carroll in 1970 to describe patients with episodes of TMVL and permanent monocular visual loss (PMVL), specifically in the absence of migraine headache (47). Most subsequent observers have used the term ‘‘retinal migraine’’ for those cases of monocular visual impairment temporally associated with attacks of migraine. Some have noted that unilateral visual loss was not restricted exclusively to the retina and advocated the term ‘‘anterior visual pathway migraine’’ or ‘‘ocular migraine’’ (6,48). The authors prefer the term ‘‘monocular migraine,’’ because it distinguishes between the loss of vision in one hemifield and that of one eye and includes sites other than the retina, such as the choroid or the optic nerve.
