In France, one in six women and one in eight men on average are subject to more or less severe chronic headaches. These migrainecan be very inconvenient on a daily basis. If there isn’t no miracle cure Against this disabling pathology, the causes also remain quite difficult to identify. An international consortium in which researchers from Inserm participated in particular has embarked on the comparison of 29 genomic studies corresponding to no less than 118,000 genetic profiles, including 23,000 from migraine sufferers.
In the review Nature Genetics which relays the progress of this work, we learn that the scientists have put their finger on five new genetic regions which may be involved in triggering migraines. These areas would be located close to other genetic regions close to the cerebral cortex. The “understanding of migraine susceptibility [est] still modest, but […] may, in the long term, contribute to the development of new treatments”, according to the authors, quoted by Santé log.
While further studies are needed to understand the exact function of the identified genes, the researchers believe that the sum of some of them could disrupt tissue regulation and nerve cells, triggering migraine symptoms.