What to bring to a neurology appointment for migraine

A first neurology appointment is short, and migraine history is long. What you can answer precisely shapes how far it gets.

Guidance from the American Migraine Foundation and NHS consistently points at the same core facts. They are unremarkable individually and genuinely hard to assemble from memory together.

What tends to be asked

• Frequency — how many headache days in a typical month, not how many attacks you remember.
• Duration — how long attacks last untreated, and treated.
• Severity and impact — whether you could work, needed to lie down, or could not function.
• Associated symptoms — nausea, light and sound sensitivity, and specifically aura and what kind.
• Treatments — what you took, how quickly, whether it helped, and how many days per month you took it.
• Timing patterns — including any relationship to menstruation.

Why memory under-reports

Recalled headache days are typically fewer than recorded ones. Mild attacks and treated attacks that resolved are the easiest to forget, and they are the ones that shift a monthly count across a threshold. Medication days have the same problem, with the added complication of over-the-counter doses taken for something else.

The consequence is not embarrassment — it is that a decision may be made against a number that is too low.

Bring facts, not conclusions

The most useful thing to bring is a factual summary of what happened, with the counts and the timing. The least useful is a theory about the cause, which uses appointment time and can steer the conversation before the history is heard.

Mira's doctor report is built for this: migraine days, attack times and durations, peak severity, functional impact, aura, and medications with relief and timing, for the last 30 or 90 days. It states what was recorded and does not interpret it.

Seek urgent medical care for a sudden severe headache that peaks within seconds to minutes, or any headache with weakness, confusion, fever and a stiff neck, vision loss, or difficulty speaking. Those are not patterns to track — they are reasons to be seen now.

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This article describes general patterns from published clinical sources. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or a treatment recommendation, and Mira is not a medical device. If your headaches are new, changing, or affecting your daily life, talk with a qualified clinician. This article — and Mira itself — exists to make that conversation more concrete, not to replace it.