An Overview of Prosopagnosia as a Symptom of Migraine: A Literature Review

Abstract

Purpose of review: Prosopagnosia is a neurological phenotype, characterized by the inability to recognize faces, typically resulting from damage or dysfunction in specific brain regions such as the fusiform gyrus. In contrast, migraine is a disease process, a complex neurological disorder with a range of symptoms including severe headache and visual disturbances.

Recent findings: The brain regions involved in migraine and prosopagnosia are located in close proximity to each other, and perhaps as an unsurprising yet rarely reported result of this, there have been several cases of migraineurs, the majority presenting with aura, who manifested prosopagnosia as a symptom during an attack. While rarely reported, the fact that prosopagnosia can occasionally manifest during migraine episodes, particularly during the aura phase, emphasizes the importance of exploring the cortical processes involved in both conditions. This review discusses migraine and prosopagnosia in the context of comorbidity, explores and summarizes current and key historical knowledge on the reported occurrences of prosopagnosia manifesting as a symptom of migraine, and emphasizes the importance of reporting this phenomenon.

Keywords: Cortical dysfunction; Migraine; Migraine aura; Occipitotemporal cortex; Prosopagnosia.

Fig. 1

Timeline of migraine-prosopagnosia case reports and studies. The red citations are single-patient case studies, while the black citations are larger studies with multiple research participants