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...however, a study in the journal Neurology suggests a more basic connection: genes. "Most people think that migraine patients are depressed because they have headaches," says the study's co-author, Dr. Gisela Terwindt, a neurologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "We found that there is a genetic predisposition by people with migraines to be depressed...
...case of the migraine study, was descended from 22 related couples, helped clarify what proportion of risk was attributable to heredity rather than environment. "What's fabulous about this study is that they were able to isolate a population so that you have a more uniform environment," notes Dr. Andrew Ahn, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) who authored an independent editorial on the Dutch study...
...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 the link between migraines and depression. But her study of 1,064 pairs of female twins, published in the journal Headache in 2009, supports the idea of a common genetic link. Schur found that among her twin sets, migraine was inherited 44% of the time and depression 58%. When one sibling...
...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 and goes, the overwhelming odds are that it is migraine," says Dr. Stephen Silberstein, director of the Jefferson Headache Center in Philadelphia. Sufferers should consult their primary-care physicians for treatment, since there are already very effective treatments for migraines on the market today, and some medications (like the tricyclic amitriptyline) that work well for both migraine and depression, according to UCSF...
Doctors who see patients complaining of headaches should screen them for depression as well, says Dr. Robert Marlow, a family-medicine physician in Scottsdale, Ariz., who recently published a paper on the issue in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Of course, "just because somebody has migraines doesn't mean they are depressed," Marlow notes. But in either case, you're better off getting diagnosed and treated rather than just suffering through the pain...