Monday, January 25, 2010
The fact that migraine patients get depressed as a conse-
quence of their disease is obvious. However, this is not the result of their headache, but from a genetic constitution.
Centre for Medical Systems Biology-partners from the LUMC and Erasmus MC published these results in the last issue of Neurology, demonstrating for the first time that joint occurrence of migraine and depression can at least partly be explained by common genetic factors.
The study included 2652 people, who previously took part in the Erasmus Rucphen family (ERF) study, a genetically isolated population. Genealogical information has shown that all participants are descended from 22 couples between 1850 and 1900 residing in the city of Rucphen. 360 of the participants in the study had migraine: 151 persons had migraine with aura and 209 people migraine without aura. In total,
there were 977 people with depression in the study, of which 25% of the migraine patients also had a depression. Only 13 per cent of the trial subjects without migraine had a depression.
The authors of the study can estimate by means of a statistical calculation the relative contribution of genetic factors for both diseases. For migraine, the heritability is estimated at 56% of the genotype,
which means that 56% of the disease is explained by genetic factors. For migraine with aura this is 96%. This finding shows that the probability of finding migraine genes is greatest for migraine with aura.
The comparison of the genotype of migraine in migraine patients with and without depression shows that there are shared genetic factors for these two diseases. This is especially true for migraine with aura.
This suggests that there is a common genetic mechanism that may cause both diseases.
More information:
www.neurology.org
www.lumc.nl