Serena L. Orr, Andrew D. Hershey, Brad G. Kurowski, Lisa Marie Langevin, Lisa J. Martin, Valentina Pilipenko, Ken Tang, Miriam H. Beauchamp, William Craig, Quynh Doan, Roger Zemek, Keith O. Yeates
Background and Objectives: To examine the association between genetic risk of migraine and post-traumatic headache (PTH) in children. Methods: This is a secondary analysis of a cohort study that recruited children aged 8-17 years within 48 hours of concussion or orthopedic injury (OI) from 5 pediatric emergency departments and followed them for 6 months. Genetic risk of migraine was estimated through (1) family history of migraine, (2) polygenic risk scores (PRSs), and (3) forty individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). PTH was categorized as: no PTH (no PTH), PTH nonmigraine phenotype (PTH-NM), or PTH migraine phenotype. Ordinal regression models with cluster-adjusted standard errors and restricted cubic splines were used to estimate associations between genetic risk of migraine and increasing severity of PTH (no PTH vs PTH-NM vs PTH migraine phenotype), adjusting for injury type (concussion vs OI), age, sex, time since injury, first principal component, deprivation indices, concussion history, and preinjury headache history. Results: < 0.001) and 2 remained significant after Bonferroni correction (rs13078967 and rs75002882). Discussion: Four migraine susceptibility genetic variants were associated with PTH, as was family history of migraine in some models, but a migraine PRS was not.