Word: depressionitis
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Such carefully planned research yielded illuminating results. About 25% of family members with migraines were depressed, vs. just 12% of relatives without migraines. Correcting for the role of chance, researchers found that, overall, relatives with migraines are 1.4 times as likely to have migraine and depression together rather than migraine...
At first blush, those odds might seem to cast doubt on a genetic link. After all, previous studies have shown that among unrelated folks, those with migraines are four times as likely to get depression as those without migraines, while this new Dutch study shows that closely related people aren...
Identifying the genetic link required even more detailed detective work. Rather than compare the rates of depression and migraine of the relatives to those of the general population, the study compared rates within this isolated population itself. For each of the 977 people studied, they calculated how much DNA that...
But what can you really understand about the general population by studying a single family in the Netherlands? "When you have an isolated population, your findings may not be true of the population at large," acknowledges Dr. Ellen Schur, an internist at the University of Washington, who has also studied...
Researchers like Terwindt and Schur have already begun hunting for the exact genes that may underlie both migraine and depression - information that could lead to novel treatments for both conditions. But headache sufferers needn't wait around for such results. "If you have a headache that is disabling and comes...