Word: terwindt
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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...
...Terwindt's study was based on phone interviews with 977 men and women from an extended family in the southwest of the Netherlands, and the researchers were smart to focus on just that family and not the wider population. Rooting out genetic links to disease is notoriously difficult and often leads to premature conclusions that later wind up being debunked. One problem is that complex disorders like migraines can be caused by multiple genes as well as by other biochemical and environmental factors...
...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't even twice as likely to share both conditions. But Terwindt says that's the wrong comparison to make. She says her team used a much stricter definition of migraine than usual, and still found a positive association between that condition and depression, which serves to support rather than contradict previous studies...
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 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...
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