Genes link to migraines
New treatment hope as research unlocks risk factor
QUEENSLAND researchers have made a world-first breakthrough that will help develop more effective treatments for people who suffer from debilitating migraine headaches.
A study led by QIMR Berghofer researcher Brittany Mitchell has shown for the first time the genetic links between brain size and migraine risk.
About one in four Australians are affected by migraine, experiencing symptoms such as severe and prolonged headaches, nausea and vomiting, sensitivity to light and sound, and brain fog. Symptoms can last anywhere from a few hours to weeks and even months.
Women are twice as likely to be affected.
Aside from the distressing impact on patients, migraine costs the Australian economy more than $35bn every year.
However, there are still many unknowns about the biological causes of the complex condition, with about half of all patients failing to respond to treatment.
“Our research found that a smaller brain size and smaller structures within the brain, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, cause an increased risk of migraine, and that this might be due to shared biological pathways that affect neuronal signalling or the regulation of blood flow,” Dr Mitchell said.
“Migraine is a difficult disorder to treat so it’s very exciting that our research has delivered a better understanding of the biology of migraine which we hope will lead to more effective treatments.
“I know personally how debilitating migraines are because I suffer from them myself. Any step towards bringing relief to patients is always very exciting and positive.”
The research, published in the journal Brain, was made possible thanks to genetic data resulting from hundreds of thousands of participants from two multinational research collaborations – the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium and the International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC).
The study’s co-author, Dale Nyholt from the QUT Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health, is a world authority on the genetics of migraine and a leader of the IHGC.
He said these new findings about the causal genetic links of migraine would lead to new avenues for research. QIMR Berghofer genetic epidemiologist and study co-author Miguel Rentería said the next step would be to further investigate the uncovered genes that are shared between brain structure and migraine risk, and to also investigate if these genes are responsible for the differences in risk between women and men.
“We now want to study these shared genetic pathways to work out whether increasing blood flow, for example, could reduce migraine risk thereby opening up new possibilities for treatments,” he said.