And international multicenter study sheds light on the causes of cluster headache, an extremely disabling disease that mostly affects men and which, fortunately, is very rare (0.1%): there are eight regions of the genome associated with a higher risk of suffering from it that are activated especially with the tobacco habit. Or put another way: smoking causes the activation of the disease in people with a genetic predisposition to suffer from it. This would explain, in part, why 80% of those affected are smokers and the rest are people who were exposed to tobacco smoke by smoking parents as children.
The study, in which 16 headache research groups have collaborated, 13 countries and which has been published in Annals of Neurologand, is based on genetic data from 4,777 cluster headache patients and 31,575 healthy people from Europe and East Asia. The cohort will continue to increase, which will make it possible to refine knowledge about the genetic factor of the disease and to analyze ethnic differences.
Cluster headache is a headache that is characterized by very acute episodes that affect one side of the brain, especially around the eyes and above the ear. The episodes of pain can occur more than once a day for a period of time ranging from three weeks to three months and, in some cases, can become chronic.
Patricia Pozo-Rosich, section head of the Neurology Service and Headache Unit at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, head of the Headache and Neurological Pain group at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and director of the Migraine Adaptive Brain Center (Centre for Migraine and the Adaptive Brain) of Vall d’Hebron, explained to this newspaper about the study, in which the VHIR Psychiatry, Mental Health and Addictions group also collaborated, which has been possible because an international consortium was created on the genetics of migraine from which another emerged (many of the researchers, including those from Vall d’Hebron, are part of both) focused on cluster headache, a disease about which until now very little was known. because of its lack of research.
The expert recalls that, before this study, neuroimaging tests knew the involvement of the posterior hypothalamus and a 2007 study in an animal model indicated that hypoxia (can be caused by tobacco) acted on the hypothalamus, which is a central regulator of biorhythms (when hormones should be released).