Dr. Albert Salazar, manager of the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, Jaume Giró, general director of the Fundació Bancària "la Caixa", and Dr. Patricia Pozo-Rosich, head of the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center, presented this morning this new space for treatment and research. The center, led by Dr. Pozo-Rosich, will allow to deepen the study of the response of the brain to the environment, to advance in the understanding of the functioning of the migrainous brain and to find new treatments to improve the lives of people affected by this silent disease.

Patients will also be treated at this center and will be able to participate, if they wish, in the research projects that will be developed there. In fact, one of the objectives of this center is, precisely, to be able to provide patients with strategies to predict migraine attacks and to cope with this pathology by improving their quality of life as much as possible.

Migrania is a cervical disease that presents with episodic and recurrent attacks of migraine associated with other symptoms (hypersensitivity to light, smell and movement, nausea and impaired cognition). The attacks last between 4 and 72 hours and prevent the development of daily activities. During a migraine attack, inflammation of the meninges occurs as a result of the release of inflammatory substances from the trigeminal nerve. Pain, which is the most disabling symptom of migraine, is caused by inflammation of the meninges. This type of headache can occur from once a year to several times a week.

According to the WHO, migraine is the sixth most disabling illness, due to lost years, patience and loss of productivity. For example, a person who suffers a weekly migraine attack from the age of 14 to 50 has lost four and a half years of his or her life. It can affect infants and adults, and, above all, women. In Spain, more than 4.5 million people suffer from migraines (three women for every man). The cost of the disease exceeds 1,800 million euros a year in Spain and 111,000 million in the European Union. As Dr. Patricia Pozo-Rosich, who is also head of the Headache Unit at Vall d'Hebron and head of the Headache and Neurological Pain Group at Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) explains, "thanks to this new Migraine Adaptive Brain Center we will be able to understand much better how the cervix of people with migraine works and launch studies to find new treatments".

This will be carried out with an interdisciplinary and complementary approach, through the study of genetics, neurophysiology and neuroimaging, with a special interest in patient education. This center includes neurologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, biotechnologists, computer scientists, biologists and biostatisticians. "We invest in research because we believe it is an investment in people's future wellbeing and because a person who suffers from a disease today is a person who has fewer opportunities. In every sense. Therefore, we have no doubt that promoting health is a way of promoting equal opportunities and, in short, progress and social welfare", emphasized Jaume Giró.

A pioneering center in Spain and a reference throughout Europe

The concept of the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center is totally innovative for several reasons. One of the most important is that it combines care work with clinical research to understand and improve the health of people with migraine. Furthermore, not only are studies being carried out to improve the health of people with migration, but studies will also be conducted on the patient's neck to understand how the neck allows us to adapt to our environment. These discoveries can be transferred to improve the health of the rest of the population as well.

In the same way that researchers study the brain of people with Alzheimer's disease to learn how memory or cognition work, the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center will study why the brain with migraine overreacts to certain stimuli, such as light or smell. The brain of a person without migraine adapts to the environment, while the brain of a person with migraine has more difficulty adapting to sudden changes. For example, a too intense light or a repetitive dullness may seem only a nuisance for most of the population, but, instead, they can trigger a migraine attack in patients. It is like a computer that is blocked because it has too many programs running. Understanding how the brain of a person with migration is synchronized (or hypersynchronized) with the environment can also have practical implications for improving the quality of life of other people. For example, to promote healthy lighting conditions and healthy sleep for the neck of all workers in the workplace.

On the other hand, the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center is also conceived as a space to empower patients. The center has, right at the entrance, three tactile panels where patients can report on different aspects of their health status and quality of life, such as the number of migraines they have had in the last few days, the intensity, what they were doing when they suffered the attacks. ... is a space designed to educate patients about the main aspects they have to take into account to understand their disease. And, since they are the ones who provide much of the data, they can be more responsible for the care of their disease.

These data are passed directly to the researchers, who analyze them and integrate them with those obtained in the laboratories. Another innovative aspect of the center is that it has three laboratories where patients are tested. They are totally isolated acoustically, sensorially and electromagnetically, in order to be able to study without interference how certain sound or sensory stimuli affect people with migration.

The laboratories are located next to the consultation rooms, which facilitates the flow of work and communication between researchers and clinicians, and also guarantees the flow of patients between the consultation and the research.

In addition, in order to allow patients to adapt to daily life, the center has a space where patients can study the neck while they carry out daily tasks. Patients with migraine have a chronic disease, and thanks to this new space, they receive guidelines so that they can learn both to adapt to the disease and to cope with it better.

Dr. Patricia Pozo-Rosich points out that migraine is much more serious and disabling than a headache: "During a migraine attack, the patient has to stay at home, with the lights off and without sleep. It is very important to raise awareness of this hereditary disease, which has a very negative impact on the most productive age of life. The heart gives years of life, but the neck gives quality of life. And now we are starting the challenge to achieve it, with initiatives, projects, energy and efforts like this one".