Public release date: 1-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Joe Hadfield joe_hadfield@byu.edu 801-422-9206 Brigham Young University
As a teenage student athlete, Emily Bates hated never knowing when the next migraine would strike, disrupting her schoolwork, practices and competitions.
Now it's payback time.
The BYU chemistry professor will publish research this week in Science Translational Medicine that identifies mutations in a gene that makes people more susceptible to migraine headaches. The study is the first demonstration of a genetic cause for the common migraine and is an important step in the search for a cure.
"I had migraines really frequently and severely," Bates said. "I would lose my vision, vomit uncontrollably it would wipe out an entire day. I decided then as a high school student that I was going to work on migraines, that I was going to figure them out and help find a cure."
Her last migraine happened the day before a marathon she planned to run in October 2003. Though her migraines eventually stopped, she didn't.
After earning a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard, Bates did post-doctoral research with a team of geneticists led by Louis Ptacek at UC San Francisco's medical school. This gene hunting party worked with two families that appeared to have a dominantly inherited form of the affliction.
The researchers zeroed in on genetic mutations these families had in common mutations that affect production of a protein known as casein kinase delta. To test whether this was a cause or a coincidence, Bates designed an experiment to determine whether the same genetic trait led to migraine symptoms in mice.
"All sensations become amplified with migraines, including touch, heat, sound and light," said Bates, who continued work on the project when she took a position at BYU in 2009.
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Genetic cause for migraines found