VHIR researchers have participated in an international research consortium that has identified almost 30 new genetic risk factors for common migraine. The results of the largest genetic study on migraine thus far have just been http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3598.html" published online in the journal Nature Genetics. The study was based on DNA samples of 375,000 European, American and Australian participants. Almost 60,000 of them suffer from migraine.The researchers combined data from 22 genome-wide association studies including new data from around 35,000 migraine sufferers. From the millions of genetic variants analyzed, 38 independent genomic regions were shown to be associated with migraine. Only ten of these regions have been implicated in migraine susceptibility before.When the researchers took a closer look on the genomic areas pinpointed in the study, they noticed that most of them overlap with known genes. Interestingly, as many as nine of the genes have been previously associated with some vascular disease and four more are known to be involved in the regulation of vascular tone, supporting the importance of blood vessels in migraine attacks.The study was conducted by members of the http://www.headachegenetics.org/ International Headache Genetics Consortium including migraine research groups from Australia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK and USA. Among these groups were researchers from Vall d'Hebron Institute of Research: Dr. Ester Cuenca and Dr. Alfons Macaya from the Head Pediatric Neurology, and Dr. Patricia Pozo, head of the Headache and Neurological Pain. Particularly, Dr. Cuenca participated in the analysis and interpretation of the results, and in the drafting of the paper.Migraine is a debilitating disorder affecting around 1 in 7 people worldwide, but its molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood which makes developing new treatments challenging. https://www.fimm.fi/en/press-release/1466436294" [International press release from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland]