New Research Provides Insight Into Genetic Migraine Risk

The largest genetic family study to be conducted on migraine has found a calculable personal genetic risk score that was applicable to approximately 60,000 patients.

Researchers from the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University Central Hospital, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, analyzed the medical and genetic history of 1589 Finnish migraine families that includes 8300-plus individuals.

As one of the most common brain disorders in the world, migraine has a propensity to affect families at an abnormal rate. However, the molecular mechanisms of the condition that lead to genetic clustering are still a relative mystery to clinicians.

This most recent study also pulled from the analysis of more than 59,000 total migraine patients by the research team, which had already led to the identification of 40-plus significant genetic risk variants that place individuals at risk of migraines. Previous work has also indicated this number may be small: hundreds, maybe even thousands, of supplemental variants may have minute impacts on individual migraine risk.

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