Back

Rare risk variants associate with epigenetic dysregulation in migraine

Ramdal Techlo, T.; Ameri Chalmer, M.; Loof Moller, P.; Kogelman, L. J. A.; Olofsson, I. A.; DBDS Genomic Consortium, ; Banasik, K.; Nyegaard, M.; Olesen, J.; Hansen, T. F.

2021-12-21 genetic and genomic medicine
10.1101/2021.12.20.21268001 medRxiv
Show abstract

Migraine has a heritability of up to 65%. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on migraine have identified 123 risk loci, explaining only 10.6% of migraine heritability. Thus, there is a considerable genetic component not identified with GWAS. Further, the causality of the identified risk loci remains inconclusive. Rare variants contribute to the risk of migraine but GWAS are often underpowered to detect these. Whole genome sequencing is reliable for analyzing rare variants but is not frequently used in large-scale. We assessed if rare variants in the migraine risk loci associated with migraine. We used a large cohort of whole genome sequenced migraine patients (1,040 individuals from 155 families). The findings were replicated in an independent case-control cohort (2,027 migraine patients, 1,650 controls). We found rare variants (minor allele frequency<0.1%) associated with migraine in a Polycomb Response Element in the ASTN2 locus. The association was independent of the GWAS lead risk variant in the locus. The findings place rare variants as risk factors for migraine. We propose a biological mechanism by which epigenetic regulation by Polycomb Response Elements plays a crucial role in migraine etiology.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.