Retinal migraine

Retinal migraine
Other names	Ophthalmic migraine, and Ocular migraine
Connections with migraine
Specialty	Neurology
Causes	Stress, smoking, high blood pressure, oral contraceptive pill, exercise, bending over, high altitude, dehydration, low blood sugar, excessive heat
Frequency	Varies from person to person

Retinal migraine is a retinal disease often accompanied by migraine headache and typically affects only one eye. It is caused by ischaemia or vascular spasm in or behind the affected eye.

The terms "retinal migraine" and "ocular migraine" are often confused with "visual migraine", which is a far-more-common symptom of vision loss, resulting from the aura phase of migraine with aura. The aura phase of migraine can occur with or without a headache. Ocular or retinal migraines happen in the eye, so only affect the vision in that eye, while visual migraines occur in the brain, so affect the vision in both eyes together. Visual migraines result from cortical spreading depression and are also commonly termed scintillating scotoma.