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I’m on site investigating issues with an event software upgrade that’s causing some folks migraine pain. While it isn’t the first time I’ve heard complaints about luminance differences between version, this is the first time I’ve ever see reports this severe.
I’ve figured a few things out but one of the patterns uncovered doesn’t male sense? So, I’m organizing my thoughts some here to try to help.
From everything i’ve read, red light is typically associated with treatment for migraine or, at least, as a way to avoid migraine otherwise triggered by light. But here? The opposite. For all accounts red hues were on of the big contributing factors for recent issues.
When we reduced red hues either through monitor color settings, software theming, or Windows color filtering it seemed to reduce overall photophobia. The same didn’t hold true for other colors reduced in the same way.
I am, of course, inclined to believe the user reports but it’s just very different than I’ve seem previous. Research I”ve read suggests that red lights, being wider amplitude, is less “activating” to the eye which means less likelihood to generate migraine pain.
But I guess I’m seeing more in mid hues - greens in particular - showing better responses/reduction to migraine potential in people. https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/139/7/1971/2464334 - this one looked at light sensitivity during migraine rather than as a cause. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347023/ - same here..
Greyscale filtering in Windows showed a pretty direct reduction in discomfort. The person fely more able to focus on the screen. So, that was good. I tried, also, changing just one color channel change at a time. Red reduction helped. Greejn reduction didn’t. Blue made things worse.
So the corellation is pretty clear just.. not clear what it actually means…
I don’t have anything revelatory to say here, just that I don’t really grok what’s going o but we are finding obvious changes that help. Which is good… but it’s really hard to prevent future issues if we don’t understand the method.
Have you ever experienced red light driven migraine pain in yourself or others? Did anything you did releive it? Get in contact on Mastodon: @angrybunnyman@mastodon.social if you have anything?