Could this protein explain why migraine is more common in women?
10 April, 2019
For reasons that scientists do not fully understand, women are three times more likely to experience migraine headaches than men. Now, new research into the activity of a protein could start to explain why.
Research going back more than 30 years has confirmed that calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) plays a major role in migraine. However, this work has revealed little about the locations of the protein's migraine activity in the body.
That was until researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, who carried out a preclinical investigation in rats and mice, pinpointed where certain pain-related CGRP activity takes place in the body. They also found that this particular activity occurs only in females.
The mechanism that they observed happens in the meninges, the protective layer of three tissues that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. Introducing CGRP into the meninges triggered pain responses in the female rodents but not in the males.
The Journal of Neuroscience has recently published a paper on the University of Texas study.
The research team suggests that the findings could start to explain why women are much more likely to experience migraine headaches than men.
"This is just the beginning," says corresponding study author Dr. Gregory Dussor, who is an associate professor of neuroscience, "of demonstrations showing that CGRP might act differently in women."
He suggests that one of the reasons that previous animal studies have not uncovered male and female differences in migraine-related CGRP activity could be because they have tended to use only male rats or mice.
Migraine not just about hormones
A migraine is a severe type of throbbing headache that happens periodically, often with disturbance of vision, nausea, vomiting, and increased sensitivity to light and sound.
According to a recent study, migraine was the sixth most common disease worldwide in 2016 and the second most common cause of "years lived with disability" during that year.
The authors of that global study concluded that, even though their analysis drew on limited data, it showed a need to give migraine and other headache disorders "greater attention in health policy debates and research resource allocation."
According to the Migraine Research Foundation, 28 million of the 39 million people in the United States who experience migraines are women.
While boys are more likely to experience these severe headaches in childhood, once children pass puberty, migraine prevalence in girls overtakes that in boys. Experts suggest that the main reason for this is the effect of estrogen. However, not all migraine headaches involve hormones.
Following research into migraine prevention that has implicated CGRP, regulators in the U.S. have approved three migraine drugs that work by blocking the protein.
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